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.

We were little children, four or five years old, but they were all around the house and they made us look epic, like we were part of some story being told. My mom would have this woman come to our house and take photos of us. She did a photo book of us as well when I was one. I still have it.

I always knew I was going to be an artist. It was a done deal right from when I was very little. It sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but my mom used to doodle when she was on the telephone and she made these - they weren't just little scribbles - these little shapes and forms. I don't know why she did it. I've never seen her do it again.

Well, I talk about one moment in the book, but I don't know if that's my moment of discovery. It was a moment. In the book, I talk about how I started shooting, how I became a photographer.

My mom had a Canon AE1 camera and I read the manual and that's basically how I became a photographer. I was in the Baltimore punk scene. I knew it was a special time, so I went out and documented that whole era. I was the only person to really do it of my friends in real black and white, beautiful portraits.

There were just moments of the punk scene and I realized that I had to capture it. There was also this photographer in our preschool - I went to a Montessori school in Baltimore, Maryland - and they had this photographer come and take all these incredible photographs. They looked like they were from Life magazine.

Yeah, it's just a lame term. I wish it was "movie star." That's a much better term than celebrity.