I think a lot of the work I've done and a lot of the work I'm going to do in the future still ties to 9/11 and the fallout from it.

At first Disco Night wasn't meant to be a book, although I'm always thinking about that in the back of my mind. It started off as a series of exploratory road trips that I was doing with Christian Hansen, who I dedicated the book to.

The travel ban that was imposed by the [Donald Trump] administration is a very direct reverberation of 9/11.

I am still covering conflict to some degree. I was back in Iraq. I've covered quite a bit of the Israel and Palestine. But I'm not doing it with the kind of intensity I was before and I'm not seeking out the front line and the kind danger that comes with being at the edge of the war the way I used to.

It was sometimes provoked by assignments, then I'd go back on my own dime if I really clicked with a place. And sometimes it was just hanging out with my family or friends.

Sometimes the picture is more interesting than what is going on. Sometimes the picture is suggestive of greater things in society or the history of what might be connected to the theme in the pictures and those are worth exploring.

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.