I was born and raised in New Zealand, in a rural valley near the capital, Wellington. Our house was built by my father and in addition to its human inhabitants, was populated by an extraordinary range of animals my mother had raised, adopted or befriended. There were many books and both my parents were quite old. As a child, I was mostly left to my own devices and ran wild.

My Mother is a doctor of Zoology. I have a starfish named for me by her-plutonaster jonathani. She pursued science at a time when it was uncommon for a woman to do so. An avid Darwinian, she went on to teach and study in Malta, Ghana and at the Smithsonian, and also travelled to Antarctica. From her I gained a deep and abiding love of nature.

My father, an architect, was also a painter and photographer. He sparked my love of photography. He made toys for me as a child, including my first camera - a rat-in-a-box-trick toy. Born in Rotterdam in 1925, my father suffered harshly during the German occupation of the Netherlands before immigrating to New Zealand in 1953. He gave me a sense of how tenuous civilization is and how finite our resources are. He always stressed how different the individual becomes when part of a mob. He disliked logos on clothes.

After dragging through school, and teenage years of general dissipation, I had a breakthrough moment at age nineteen. I put a folio together and gained access to what was then the best photography program in the country. I then went on to pursue my work and haven't looked back. I have lived in Argentina and Brazil, and I now live in New York, happily so.