Education Quote by Herb Ritts

There is something quietly audacious in Ritts framing his education as eyesight, not résumé. “Honing my eye” sounds modest, almost workshop-level craft talk, but it’s also a claim about authorship: the real skill isn’t the camera, the lights, or the access to famous faces. It’s the ability to decide what counts as an image worth making, then make everyone else believe it, too. When he adds, “I think I had a good eye,” the hedging (“I think”) reads less like uncertainty than a kind of practiced restraint - confidence without the macho mythology of the genius.

The intent is pragmatic: he’s describing how taste becomes a tool. But the subtext is sharper. Ritts is telling you that style is a discipline, not a vibe. In photography, “the eye” is shorthand for a whole chain of choices: where to stand, what to crop out, how to use shadow as editing, how long to hold a subject in a pose until it stops looking performed and starts looking inevitable.

Context matters: Ritts helped define the sleek, sculptural celebrity image-making of the 1980s and 1990s, when fashion, music, and Hollywood were converging into a single global look. In that economy, a “good eye” is power - it turns bodies into icons and creates a standard others chase. The line also hints at a paradox: the more “natural” Ritts’s images appear, the more they advertise the labor of seeing. His lesson is almost ruthless: talent might open the door, but taste keeps you in the room.