Nothing is over until there's something more decisive than your own thoughts.

That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it's something that's really there [in America] as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of desperation, in the hope of disrupting the power structure so they can live better lives. I think in those ways, it's intimately connected to today.

The big question that everyone is asking themselves, or what they should be asking themselves right now, is what role has the media played in not just missing a certain part of American society that wanted to vote for, say, Donald Trump, but what role has the media played in dehumanizing other people and helping create these conditions that people are so afraid of, say, Muslims and extremism?

I was taking all prints and I brought them to the Magnum meetings, trying the old Josef Koudelka trick: Give them to photographers, who are getting bored during the talks about the economics of the agency, to look through with a pen. They'll separate them in two piles. I started to find the core pictures that people seem to relate to.

I began to explore America in more general terms. I really started this work in 2009. I got the bulk of it done as I was easing out of Disco Night.

Buzzing at the Sill is from a Theodore Roethke poem called "In a Dark Time." I'd heard a small part of it in a play, a sort of sci-fi play about morality in a virtual reality universe. Nothing to do with the book precisely, but it was a great play.

Even though most people were disconnected from [travel ban], the moment amplified a fairly massive and somewhat irrational fear that exists in the populace at large.