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.

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.

Learning that aesthetic as a kid - seeing those photos - made me think that that's what photos are supposed to look like. I never understood snapshots. I was looking at them like, "This is horrible; that's not what a picture is supposed to look like." I was taught by these photos. So when I picked up the camera, though I had never done it before, I kind of already knew what I was doing.

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

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.

I was fooling around one day and looking at Yahoo! Jobs. I typed in "photo" and, of course, what comes up is "One hour photo lab" or "Be a photographer in Disneyland" or jobs that no one really wants as a photographer. I saw, by chance, this ad that said, "Wanted: Photographer for premieres and Hollywood events" and I thought, "This can not be real. This is ridiculous. No one advertizes this!" I was really suspect about 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.