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.

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.

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.

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

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]

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 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.