My father used to teach me things. He taught me about photography, how light passed through a lens and created a negative, bleaching out areas on sensitized paper. Somehow I realized that my skin could be a sensitized surface. Since [my sister] Louise was the photographic subject of the house, I put a negative of a picture of her on my upper arm, and taped it there with surgical tape. I was eight or nine, and we were still living in Cedarhurst, so I went out into the sun, in the backyard, with the negative taped to my shoulder. I actually kept it there for two or three days. Then I peeled it off, and there was Louise, burned into my skin. That was my first portrait.