I have to ask about the fact that you were funded by an energy company [Scottish South Energy]. Did you feel restricted in any way with the work that you were doing?
Well, the actual access is more important than the funding. And there’s no way that I’m going to let any of the funding stream dictate how I’m going to approach the subject. So I’m asking these companies for a lot of trust. I’m effectively asking them to give me the opportunity to scrutinize their operations visually. And it’s a fine line. I can’t let the fact that I’m working with them and working for them dictate or motivate how I present the work, because I couldn’t call myself an artist or an editorial photographer. They trust me in how I’m going to approach it, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be all roses or that I’m going to skate over the bits they don’t want to see.

You’ll have to tread that fine line next in China. What else are you hoping to capture in the coming phases of this study?
Well, there’s a reason for choosing Scotland as a starting point. I wanted to capture the grandfather of renewable energy, and what interested me about that was that they built this without any of the pressures of pollution or climate change or the modern reasons for renewables. They built it because it was an obvious way of producing electricity. I’m flying to China this week for meetings with a major Chinese power producer. They have a few different schemes of energy technologies. What I am really interested in out there is, historically and almost correctly, China is famous for its massive growth of industry with a disregard for the environmental results.