Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.

In the same way, photography, for me, has fragmented. You do have people doing bodies of work - often with found photographs - that are quite hard to understand unless you got a very sophisticated visual history behind you. But there are different camps.

I love photographing. I love the experience of being around all the things that surround you when you go out to do work.

It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.

There was a time, right up until the end of the Second World War and beyond, when white people in Europe thought that they basically owned the world and that everybody else was a sort of servant, or a curiosity, or whatever. And that informed 99 percent of the photographic practice that was done. Without being able to address that, I felt I would have failed in my attempt to explain what the urge to document is.

Environmentalism is a personal thing - but it's also a planetary thing. It's about making deep connections. But it's also about recognizing the very human connection between species diversification and ourselves.

Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really.