My mom had bought this camera to take classes herself and I remember working with her on it, understanding how the stop-motion [worked], having a high shutter speed and things like that. Long before I picked it up myself, I remember being on a slide at a country club going into the water and wanting my mother to put in on a high shutter speed so she could catch me on the slide without it being blurred. I remember having fun with her: "Let me go on the slide and you'll catch me in motion!" Those are some of the little moments in my artistic making.

But when I was a kid, I would look at the paper next to the phone and I would think to myself, "I want to do that." So I started doing that. [doodling]

Only sometimes I try to think about it in context. When I think about the context of, "Oh, I'm this or that," in this society, that's one of the terms.

A lot of people have done that over the years. Many of the agencies today were started by photographers. It's a normal progression. It wasn't some crazy idea, it was just, "Can we start our own agency? Can we do this?"

That was my experience with everybody in the book. That was what was so cool. It's just an excuse to hang out with people. It's not for a movie; it's not for a magazine. No one's here telling us what to do. We're at my house shooting. I just get to go, "What do you want to do today?" We're only there because we want to be there because of each other. There's no other reason.

I never went to school for that. In high school we had photography, which was great. That was another moment of discovery. I had a great teacher - I can't even remember her name now. I ended up going to boarding school for my last high school years and they had a dark room there. Of course there was curfew; you were supposed to be in bed at a certain time. But I would sneak out and sneak into the dark room and work all night.

My teacher introduced me to this photographer Eugène Atget. He was a French photographer in the late 1800s up until 1927 in Paris. He didn't consider himself an artist, but he was probably one of the artists of the 20th century. This guy documented all of Paris during those years. It's unbelievable. The books are phenomenal. The Museum of Modern Art has all his stuff now and [American photographer] Berenice Abbott saved his work. Not very much is known about his life, but the work is unreal and it totally spoke to me. He was the only artist for a number of years that I cared about at all.