Daily Inspiration Quote by Herb Ritts

There is a quiet flex in the way Ritts frames distance as advantage. By positioning himself as "coming from California" and "not being involved in the New York scene", he’s not just naming geography; he’s rejecting an entire cultural pipeline. In late-20th-century photography, New York signaled gatekeepers, fashion-week proximity, editorial power, and a very specific taste machine. Ritts implies that opting out of that orbit let him dodge the gravitational pull of consensus.

The repetition is the tell: "my personal way, in my own way, at my own pace". It’s less redundancy than manifesto. Each clause reinforces a different kind of independence: aesthetic identity ("personal"), method and decision-making ("own way"), and timing ("pace"). That last one matters most. Creative scenes don’t just influence style; they enforce speed. They reward quick alignment with trends, quick networking, quick production. Ritts’ subtext is that slowness can be strategic - a way to let a voice crystallize before it gets sanded down into something market-friendly.

Context sharpens the intent. Ritts became synonymous with sunlit bodies, sculptural minimalism, celebrity intimacy - imagery that feels native to Los Angeles’s mythos, where light and leisure can be both subject and selling point. By casting his growth as self-directed, he’s also quietly claiming authorship over a look that could be dismissed as "West Coast glossy". The line argues that the polish wasn’t derivative; it was cultivated. Not outside the scene as in irrelevant, but outside it as in unbought.