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I moved from a mountain with one traffic light to New York City when I was 17, and it was an amazing, eye opening, creative adventure. I would walk through the streets of Manhattan looking up at these huge buildings, amazed that I didn't know a single person in any of them.

I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.

Success is like a high-rise building I'm on the first floor. There are a lot of people in the basement or the parking lot but I was lucky enough to have made it to the first floor and I'm looking to make it to the penthouse.

I was making projections about 'Humans of New York,' back when I had zero followers, that made all my friends and family roll their eyes. I'd throw out these huge numbers: 'One day, a million people are gonna be looking at this. Trust me.' And even those wild, wild numbers I was throwing out have just been smashed. So, it's a good feeling.

It's difficult because Manhattan is so fantastic, and it's 9 miles away, and all these cool rich people live there and have great lives, and you live in a semi-attached row house in Queens.

I'd gone to Manhattan to become a model.

We lived in Manhattan, which was unbearable sometimes because it was so noisy. There were sirens blaring, construction sites going, people shouting and swearing at each other.

I wanted to experience New York, to look up and see buildings.

I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, there are people who live there who have been to Manhattan maybe once or twice.

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.