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.

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.

I think, oddly, that the world of the amateur is quite self-contained, and it depends on "likes" from other amateurs to perpetuate itself. Of course an awful lot of my colleagues are involved with Instagram - they get likes and dislikes, maybe just likes, I don't know - but I think that it's far less self-contained, the world I work in. It goes off in different directions, and is dependent on responses different from a tick or a like or whatever.

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

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

Newspaper photographs nowadays are highly tautologous. You'll have an article about, say, stopping the war. And the photograph that will be used is literally a poster that reads "Stop The War." Or you'll have a story about a cash crisis in Barcelona, and the only picture you'll see is an ATM in Barcelona. The problem is actually systemic. On the one hand, you'll have a picture of a soda can to "illustrate" an article about the dangers of sugary drinks. On the other hand, anything that's reasonable in documentary photography is snapped up by the art world and we never see it.

I think it's terribly important to reach out and understand all the different types of life and the different types of challenges that are present around the world. And I think the more people who can do that the better our planet will probably be.