The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.

I was growing up in the suburbs; I was one of eight kids. So I did have a community when I was younger, but all of my brothers and sisters were older.

A lot of people, even my parents, thought, "Art school, I don't know. We'll support you but the success rate for artists is really slim."

Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.

I have a really big family, and pretty much all my work is about my brothers and sisters. I'm the youngest of eight - my mom had seven kids in seven years, and then she had me 11 years later - so I was basically raised by all these teenagers.

I put all of my time into art because I couldn't go back to Jersey and work at Starbucks.

I was never told, "Fags are going to hell." You just didn't talk about it.