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.

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.

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?"

Over the years, she [my mother] always encouraged me in the arts. She actually worked at an art museum when we were kids. I took classes there. She was the one that, when we'd go to the store and I would have a pack of eight pastels, she'd say, "No, get the 24-pack." She was always encouraging me to get the best materials, which was really awesome.

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 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.