Education Quote by Herb Ritts

Ritts frames his education as a kind of flirtation with the everyday: not the sanctified “studio,” but the end of the street, the anonymous garage, the lucky angle of light that turns banal architecture into a set. The intent is quietly polemical. He’s arguing that vision comes first, technique second - that you learn photography by chasing what pulls at you, not by completing exercises designed to teach you which dial does what. The subtext isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-institutional: art school can teach competence, but it can also train you to stop trusting your own appetite.

Notice what he elevates: “a certain feeling,” “a particular light.” That’s the language of intuition, and it’s also a confession about his eventual aesthetic. Ritts became synonymous with luminous surfaces and sculptural bodies; here you can see the origin story in miniature. Before the famous faces, there’s the friend who “needed a head shot,” a practical favor that doubles as permission to look closely. Photography, for Ritts, starts as service and improvisation, not self-mythology.

Context matters: he came up in a late-70s/80s image economy where fashion, celebrity, and advertising were becoming the culture’s shared vocabulary. His DIY apprenticeship suggests a porous border between personal exploration and professional hustle. The garage isn’t just a location; it’s a metaphor for how glamour gets manufactured - from found light, borrowed space, and the photographer’s ability to recognize a set hiding in plain sight.