I think the driving force when I moved to New York was the fear of going home with my tail between my legs.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.

In college, all my friends were graffiti writers, but I never wrote graffiti. I wanted to participate and do something cool on the street, so I'd make these portraits of people. I'd isolate them on a white wall, make a silkscreen of it, and do these portraits in bathrooms and all around. That's how I started the Polaroids.

You find the people that you need to find. There's this gravitational pull.

I'm not going to hide behind anything.

I was studying graphic design at the time, when negative scanners and all that stuff was coming out, and you could do it all in your apartment. So I would shoot, make contact sheets, scan all the cool negatives, and make all these zines and books of my photos to give to my friends. I was really into zine- and bookmaking from skate culture.

I'm interested in reaching the masses with my work. It's one of my goals.