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?"

The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it.

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.

I was doing a lot of web design at the time. And anybody that has an agent thinks, "Why do I need an agent?" Maybe it's a little different as an actor - of course you need an agent - but any kind of agency that's selling something for you, you think, "Why can't I sell this myself? It doesn't make sense."

So I tried to get my shot with a 50mm and I did it - this is when we're shooting film, not digital. The guy that hired me looked through the pictures and was like, "Oh, this is pretty good. You did a good job." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm sorry. I only had a 50mm. My girlfriend rented the wrong lens..." and he stopped looking at the pictures and he looked up at me and he said, "You shot this with a 50mm? You're hired."

It was a fortunate moment in history that I happened to be in. There was a confluence of the internet and all this other stuff that I was able to capitalize on.

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.