We’ve heard you got arrested at one point while finishing up the book. Tell us about that experience.

I got arrested in Yemen on my second trip to the Empty Quarter. It was in an area where there were a lot of guns and where the government doesn’t really have control of the area. And I think they just got nervous and suspicious about a foreigner playing around with a camera. They didn’t get that I was just trying to make cool images. They don’t really have a vibrant, free press in Yemen, let alone exposure to a lot of press photography. You know, they’re used to a press conference or someone standing in front of a microphone, they don’t understand a man flying around with a weird parachute. The first night we had to sleep under armed guard, but after that we were transferred to a hotel, we were kind of on house arrest for, I think it was three days. We couldn’t leave. I could make phone calls, I could wander around. We tried to be very polite and well behaved. We answered all of their questions and they took everybody in our team and interviewed them separately and kept asking questions over and over. They eventually realized that they had nothing to go on other than their own suspicions so they let us go.
I thought we would get out of it. The problem was they kept demanding the film and it was right at the end of the trip. And we had crossed the desert, which is very hard to do both physically and politically. They wanted the film and it was kind of like…you’re wearing a cashmere sweater and someone asks if they can have a little snip of that.  You know that as soon as they do that, the whole thing is gonna unravel. They couldn’t really process the film there properly, it was a nightmare. So I just had to deny them and say, “No, you’re not gonna have the film,” which made them even more suspicious.  Fortunately they were asking for it, not demanding. 

When it comes to aerial photography versus on the ground, do you consider the relationship between the two during the process?

I’ve worked on a project where I was asked to do nothing but aerial photography, like an aerial portfolio of China. And to be honest, after doing that kind of work for a period of time, I get kind of too distanced from people. I want to be on the ground and with the people and find out what’s going on and see the textures so I can see the overall pattern.  I find for me a more interesting shoot is to be integrated between work in the air and work on the ground.

In my first book about Africa, I decided to make it all aerial because Africa is so diverse. I thought the way the book came together was an interesting way to look at Africa. But for Arabia, you do a whole book of sand dunes and you’re going to lose your people. 

It’s all so fantastic, you see these people with elaborate henna tattoos and you see the city and you see what it’s like on the street there. You say, “Wow, I wanna see.  I’m curious.  I wanna get inside and see.” A lot of that you can’t get from the air and it’s the two combined that really works.