There is a danger in our modern practice of using embedded journalism. As there is less and less money available for journalism to uphold its independence, there is a temptation for people to take short cuts. If this army or that army or this corporation is willing to pay for your flight or your accommodation, then it's much more difficult to tell what the real story might be. I do have a concern about that.

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.

My current project was shot on film, and because of that I've spent my entire day removing dust-specks from negatives. You wouldn't have to do that on digital because you don't get dust on the scanner. I say to myself, "Why am I doing this all day?" I could have just bought a digital camera and I wouldn't have to remove dust-specks ever again. But when you move closer to a film image, it has a real truth to it. And I really like that.

Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.

As humans, we need to question all these notions. What does freedom mean for us? What are our responsibilities? It takes one-250th of a second to take a photograph. So I have the whole of the rest of that second - and of that day - to think.

There is a danger in our modern practice of using embedded journalism. As there is less and less money available for journalism to uphold its independence, there is a temptation for people to take short cuts. If this army or that army or this corporation is willing to pay for your flight or your accommodation, then it's much more difficult to tell what the real story might be. I do have a concern about that.

After my mother died, I lived with relatives. Reading was a means of escaping into other worlds, as photography, much later, was to become.