[Buzzing at the Sill] deals with the margins of America, a lot of parts unseen. Well, parts that are seen and familiar to a lot of the populace, but unseen when it comes to the parameters of what mainstream news and popular culture and Hollywood reflects.

I'm a constant editor. Every few months or so I make a ton of 4x6 prints. I put them on a magnetic board and I live with them for a while to see what bubbles to the surface. A lot of this was part of Disco Night originally, and I suddenly started realizing, "If I keep working on this because I'm not done and I put all that in Disco Night, how can this be one book? Is it going to be too long and bloated and crazy?".

I read the poem [In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke] because I was intrigued and had one of those strange senses: "This poem is kind of important to me. I don't know why, but I'm going to just keep it in the back of my mind." I just kept coming back to it. As I started putting the book together and writing the stories for it, this idea of buzzing as a word kept popping up in my brain.

What I was doing for those assignments wasn't always directly tied to what I was doing for myself, but it gave me the space to photograph. I started getting assignments that dealt with my own interests and made some pictures in that direction.

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

I went out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally [in Buzzing at the Sill] because I was interested in war as a notion and in experiencing it. I was interested in history and how societies form. I was interested in the recent history of what had provoked these wars. So when I finally got out there, I was really seeing the wars through the American perspective, much more than through being embedded with American soldiers and Marines.

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?