I guess I first realized that I was 'into' photography during my sophomore year in high school. I was fifteen years old, a shy preppy kid who somehow managed to hang out with the cool crowd. One of my good friends was a talented photographer and total camera geek, the kind that spent days in the darkroom enlarging black & white prints. I was always intimidated by the darkroom with its menacing subculture, overly self-absorbed kids who possessed all the nicest equipment -- Nikon F's and Canon AE's and Pentax K's. My camera was a throwaway Konica rangefinder an uncle gave me. While the 'real' photographers were fine-focusing on macro shots of flower petals, I was out enjoying twelve-packs of Budweiser with my friends after school, taking snapshots of us hanging out at the lake, snow skiing on winter break, sneaking into hot tubs with our girlfriends, or just messing around. By the time I went to the University of North Carolina, I found myself taking even more photos of friends, and the pictures ocassionally became a little more posed and outrageous.

The greatest thing about this kind of documentary photography was that I could actively participate in the shot, or could just sit back in the corner in a daze and observe everything through the lens. Either way, the camera eventually just became a part of things.

We took random roadtrips with no purpose other than to push boundaries of impulsiveness and intoxication, driving 14 hours to the Florida Keys or a weekend trip to the mountains to go camping on shrooms. I remember sitting on the front porch of our house in Chapel Hill on a Tuesday night at midnight, deciding we should drive four hours to my parent's lake cabin to jump in the water in the middle of the winter, just as part of a ridiculous dare. On the way there, the tire blew and the car careened off the highway. It was a great moment for a photo shoot.

Andy Warhol once wrote that it isn't the fabulous party that you'll remember, but rather the cab ride there (or something like that). These road trips were unforgettable, and the photographs help make them timeless. It wasn't until after college that I realized how many photographs I had taken over the years; and how, over time, these snapshots didn't seem quite so accidental but instead seemed to resonate more like a story.

I've never had any fine arts training. My formal education consists of a business degree in finance & marketing, and the only artistic guidance I've received is from one of those evening community courses called 'Introductory to Photography' at the Atlanta College of Art. I learned more from the art school students screwing around in the darkroom than from any course materials. These kids were overexposing, underexposing, blurring, developing in the wrong chemicals, always glancing over each other's shoulders while Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins cranked full-blast over the darkroom speakers. The course teacher, a tenured professor from the college, taught us the basic technical aspects of using a manual camera (aperture, shutter, focus, lighting) and how to enlarge prints in the darkroom. Each week, he would send us out with specific project assignments. Two of these assignments probably influenced my work more than anything else. One was a 'close-up' shot where you were supposed to use a wide angle (35mm) lens to take a portrait of someone's face -- the professor instructed us to invade the model's personal space to the point that it became uncomfortable. The other assignment was to approach a complete stranger on the street, to look them directly in the eye and ask to take their portrait. Barriers were immediately shattered, and I was hooked.

After working as an investment banker for a few years, I decided to cash in a bonus check and start a new magazine called Pavement. My creative director Adam Roe (a former professional skateboarder turned graphic designer) and I were both bored with existing magazines and tired of searching for photography and design we could relate to, so we decided to start our own. In order to take my photography skills a step beyond its informal snapshot style, I wanderedaround the East Village approaching random people on the street asking to photograph them, trying out as many cameras and lenses and lighting methods as I could think of. I know it's become a cliche among photographers, but the 'mistakes' really were the images that caught my attention.

I took about 2,500 portraits in my first few years in New York City (most of them complete crap but a few that I'm continually drawn to as time passes). Several of the random people on the street ended up being models or actors or celebrities (I took a portrait of singer Ani Difranco in a bar in the Lower East Side and didn't realize until two years later when a friend was sifting through some of my old Polaroids). From the very start, I was surprised at how few people said 'no' when a complete stranger asked to take their photograph, and even more amazed at how beautiful and emotional many of these portraits became. Whether I was taking portraits of good friends or complete strangers, it often seems difficult to differentiate between the two.

Some of my favorite moments are included below:

Busted
Getting detained by police for sneaking into an abandoned hanger with actor Jay Gillespie while doing a photo shoot at Floyd Bennett Field (a decommissioned Air Force base), and then having the arresting officers demand that Jay "prove" he was an actor by doing an impromptu monologue of Sebastian from Shakespeare's Fifth Night, while I snapped pictures unnoticed as the officers clapped at his performance.

Disco Bloodbath
Introducing myself to a cool tattooed kid on Avenue B after taking his portrait... "By the way, my name's Ned." The kid replies "Hi, I'm Daniel Auster." My response, "That's interesting, I'm reading a book by Paul Auster; he's one of by favorite authors..." Daniel grins and says "Yeah, I know him; that's my dad." A few days later I read in the Village Voice that Daniel would be testifying as a witness in the Peter Gatien ecstacy drug ring trial, and that he was apparently the teenage kid who was passed out in the apartment during the infamous Disco Bloodbath clubland murder of Angel Melendez by Michael Alig.

Preston
Sitting in a bar in the East Village next to a punk Asian kid, and a pervy old man sits down next to him and says "Can I buy you a drink?" The Asian kid looks at him for a few seconds and says "Yeah sure, but keep your hands off..." then looks over at the bartender and says "I'll have two Rolling Rocks, on him..."