Daily Inspiration Quote by Herb Ritts

Ritts is selling a kind of cosmopolitan ease: the idea that you can land in Africa, clock the light, the bodies, the textures, and feel "at home" because your visual language travels. Coming from a fashion-and-celebrity photographer whose signature was sun-bleached elegance and sculptural bodies, "universal" is doing double duty. It reads as an artistic credo (good images speak across borders) and as a permission slip (my gaze is legitimate anywhere).

The subtext is where it gets thorny. "It didn't matter" quietly brackets the actual matter of place: history, power, and the asymmetry baked into Western artists extracting beauty from non-Western settings. Ritts isn't describing Africa as specific; it's a proving ground for his thesis that the same formal elements (light, form, sensuality, composition) override cultural difference. That's a familiar modernist move: reduce the world to geometry and atmosphere, claim neutrality, call it human.

Why it works is also why it’s vulnerable. The rhetoric is smooth, confident, aspirational; it flatters both artist and audience with the fantasy that taste equals empathy. Yet "universal" in photography often means "readable to the markets that buy photographs" - galleries, magazines, Western editorial culture. Ritts is articulating a late-20th-century global aesthetic where the body becomes a shared currency and location becomes a backdrop, not a subject. The comfort he describes is real, but it’s also a tell: feeling at home everywhere can be a sign of deep connection, or of never having to negotiate belonging in the first place.