From what I’ve read, you left home at a pretty young age and traveled the world?

That sounds a lot more dramatic than what was actually happening. I was born in LA, and my grandmother basically raised me until I was about thirteen. That’s when I started getting into trouble. I was never really a bad kid or anything, but my grandmother had already raised four kids. So, at the first sign of any trouble for me, she sent me to live with my parents in Florida. I looked into some schools with my parents, and they all seemed pretty ridiculous, like I would waste time if I went to high school out there. I met this girl while in Florida named Sarah, and she had a grandmother that owned a knife shop in Switzerland. She needed a friend to go work in the knife shop with her to speak English to the tourists. I guess my parents thought Switzerland was good enough because a fourteen-year-old kid wouldn’t be able to get into trouble, which they were right about. I went out there and just kind of traveled around. I basically did that for 5 months every year until I was 18 when I moved back to LA and got my own place.

Would you go back to Florida after those five months?

I’d go back to Florida for a couple of months and visit my family. I’d come to LA. Honestly, I don’t know what I was doing. [laughs] The whole thing seems kind of weird now. [laughs] It seems like my education was just traveling around.

Have those travels had any impact on your work?

It made me very independent. I didn’t really know what other kids were doing because all my friends weren’t in school either. They weren’t following what other people were doing, and that’s how we became friends. We made our own rules and just kind of did our own thing. I think the way that affected me in my photos is that I’m able to follow my own instincts about things.