I was on significant financial aid, an only child, with parents who didn't have much living in North Carolina.
When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.
I grew up in a household where my mom made $16,000 a year. I know the struggle. I know how to keep those things in perspective, and I do keep it into perspective.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
My father worked three jobs, my mother worked two, seven days a week sometimes. And they wouldn't take welfare or social assistance, they were too proud.
We had bills to pay. My dad wasn't working, and it was tough for my mom. People were always raising the rent, so I had to work, too. Everybody in the house worked to pay the rent.
I think a lot of people think I was born in a blue suit, on the David Brinkley show. And that isn't me. I am much more that kid who grew up in South St. Louis, in a very modest household, with a simple background with parents who didn't get through high school.
My parents divorced, my brothers and I ended up living with my mother, and we were living with the choice of heating or eating. My mum was working, but she needed financial support to make ends meet. I had to have free school dinners and free school uniforms.
My mum was working in Walmart for €350 per month, about £280. My father was working as a house painter. We had a difficult situation with money.
We didn't have much money growing up, so we hopped around L.A. a lot in the '70s, '80s and '90s. I'm very familiar with the shifting culture there.
My dad was a civil servant before he retired, and my mum worked, too. We could not always get three meals in a day; sometimes we'd struggle.
I was the youngest of seven kids and I would not have been able to go to college without an athletic scholarship.
My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.
I was just a regular kid in poverty, struggling.
There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.
I grew up poor. My mother raised a family of four on between $9,000 and $15,000 a year.
I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.
We didn't have a whole lot of cash growing up. My mom was a single parent for a while before my stepdad came into the picture.
I grew up poor.
I come from a family of eight on public assistance, my parents were separated. My mother struggled, my father struggled.
I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.
I grew up as a fairly poor kid in, you know, Toronto, Canada. I don't think I owned any new clothes until I was, like, 15 or something. They were all second-hand and forged from paper.
As a young single mum struggling to get by, I didn't get to go to university, but that level of debt would have been unimaginable.
It used to bug me that I couldn't even afford to take my family for a proper holiday. I didn't have any professional knowledge, and getting a photographer's job in a magazine was out of the question. So, armed with a Pentax K1000, I started going to various maidans of Mumbai, looking for subjects.
Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help.
