‘Les didn’t wear gloves as he needed to be able to feel the bees so he didn’t crush them. “Should I put them on my face?” he said. “Sure!” I replied’

The jumping-off point for my Bare Handed series was a bird becoming trapped in the netting around the raspberry bushes in my backyard. It made me think of the problem humans have interacting with the natural world. How do we navigate obtaining food and the other things we need while still being good stewards of the land? I’d seen work by photographers demonstrating how Big Agriculture was destroying the environment. I wanted to find people who took a respectful approach, tried to work in tandem with it, but who might be in a fearful or dangerous situation.

I approached Les, the man in this picture, after speaking to the director of an exhibition space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had hired him to remove a feral beehive from his tree. I’d already tried to photograph another beekeeper who wore a full protective suit, but he might as well have been an astronaut. With Les, I was able to stay nearby and work with him over three days. The first couple involved straightforward documentary pictures of him tending his hives. Then, on the third day, his apprentice Amber showed up to help.

A new exhibition has trawled the Martin Parr Foundation’s archive to find these haunted images – revealing the UK as a place of fear and fascination

Many Muslims saw their places of worship destroyed or abandoned during the sectarian violence of India’s partition in 1947. Now villagers of many faiths are coming together to revive them

Gajju Khan is smiling as he sits in an unfinished building in the northern Indian state of Punjab in the late afternoon. The 87-year-old is hopeful that before he dies he will hear the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer, echo across his village once again when the mosque is completed.

The last time he heard it here was when he was eight years old, living with his parents in Tira Maloya, a village in Chandigarh, not far from where he lives now.

Bibi Rajinder Kaur, a Sikh, donated family land to build a mosque in her village. ‘There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship,’ she says

A striking transformation takes place along the coast of Qinqdao in autumn, when a native seepweed turns a brilliant shade of red.

The ‘red beach’ phenemon can be seen in the salt marshes and wetlands on the coast of China’s Shandong province, where the Suaeda glauca plant matures and absorbs water, changing it from green to crimson between September and November