I’m from Newark, New Jersey but from the age of 13 or 14 I’d go into New York and hang out in book and record stores, looking at photos in books and on album covers. I was obsessed with the raw style of the photographs of Blondie or the punk scene over in Britain, and attracted to street culture in general. There was a school near me which had all the badass kids outside, with cool clothes, getting into fights. I wanted to go to a school like that but my aunts who lived in that neighbourhood would go: “Absolutely not. That’s a terrible school.”
I was an artsy kid and started taking photos of friends in my high school. Around 1987 I got really into hip-hop and began shooting the kids that I met in clubs. I would hit up magazines, showing them my work, or look on the back of record sleeves, call the record companies and ask if I could meet somebody in the art department. So when hip-hop started blowing up, I happened to be blowing up at the same time.
