The people of Baltimore are great. I love Baltimore. What I looked forward to, every year, was getting a new apartment in a different part of town and hanging out. People started to see you in the character that you were, so everyone thought I was real police.
I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.
I spent a lot of time standing on street corners [of New York City] talking to local residents. I spent time in bookstores and galleries. But most of the time, I really did not have much to do.
I'm told that as a child, when my dad was alive, I'd get up, put on my coat and go sit in the back of his car. The driver would just go around the neighborhood - as long as I had my little trip, I was happy.
There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding.
There would be this advantage in traveling in your own country, even in your own neighborhood, that you would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw you would make fewer traveler's mistakes.
You got to look outside- your eyes- you got to think outside- your brain- you got to walk outside- your life- to where the neighborhoods change.
As a kid, I think I rearranged the rooms of almost every house on the block.
I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )
I remember living in a pretty small neighborhood where you could play in the streets and run around like crazy. My friends and I would ride our bikes around, but instead of just riding our bikes, we were solving crimes and going out in the woods to see what lay out there.
I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.
I've gotten super into restaurants in L.A., so I try to go to different restaurants all the time... that's a good way to explore L.A.: you can drive to a restaurant and discover a new neighborhood.
I enjoy walking through Nolita and Chinatown, watching the people and the buildings, browsing through shops and stopping at little cafes for a cup of coffee or glass of wine.
And I remember as a second or third grader having some autonomy to go to the store if I felt like it, walk home, take my time, kick the can. We were on our own schedule after school, so that was cool.
For me, it's like biking around the neighborhood, the walks and stuff, because I have never enjoyed the gym. Or I'll do, since I used to dance a lot, all the old dance exercises.
We had a thing there where you could turn in - it was some sort of recycling program - the bottle caps of RC Cola. You'd turn in 12 of them, and you'd get a ticket to see a movie. That's how I started going to the movies. Running around the neighborhood looking for bottle caps. We were like little scavengers.
If your child is starting a new school, walk around your block and get to know the neighborhood children.
We wanted to show people what it was like in one of those neighbourhoods that they would never have access to, in bars that they would be too scared to go into, and a world that they would never get to see. All of that is something really unusual and rare and kind of fascinating. And the only way to do that and to make it really worthwhile was that it had to be authentic. We dedicated a lot of time and energy to making that right and real. So we found basically the worst locations that we could.
