Education Quote by Herb Ritts

Ritts is doing something photographers often do when they want permission to be bolder: he relocates the audience. Europe, and France in particular, becomes a kind of cultural alibi - a place where “many images” (read: nude bodies, queer-coded glamour, erotic charge, high-style provocation) can be received as art instead of scandal. The line isn’t just a travel note. It’s a map of where he believes looking has been trained, and where it hasn’t.

The intent is practical and strategic. Ritts made work that lived on the fault line between editorial fashion, celebrity portraiture, and fine art. In the U.S., those categories are policed by commerce and moral panic: what sells, what offends advertisers, what triggers censorship, what gets dismissed as “just” sexy. By praising French “education” and “cultural awareness,” he’s invoking a longer visual tradition - museums, cinema, the normalized presence of the nude - that frames sensuality as literacy rather than threat.

The subtext is also a quiet critique of American innocence as performance. “Appreciative” doesn’t only mean more sophisticated; it implies less reactive, less eager to reduce an image to its potential to corrupt. Coming from a photographer who helped define late-20th-century celebrity iconography, it reads like a pushback against the U.S. habit of consuming eroticized imagery constantly while demanding it pretend to be accidental.

Context matters: Ritts’s peak coincides with the culture wars, the AIDS crisis, and a tightening feedback loop between celebrity, sexuality, and backlash. Europe isn’t automatically more enlightened, but in his framing it offers what he needs most: viewers willing to meet the image on its own terms.