“The image of a photographer in a lot of countries,” Banning tells me over the phone from his home in Utrecht, “is of a guy who goes to warm countries, goes to the beach, and takes photographs of beautiful ladies in bikinis. So I think in most cases, they looked at me as a kind of sorry loser.” Over the four years, Banning voluntarily entered a world that most regular citizens do their best to avoid at all costs. Getting permission to shoot his subjects in their offices was a sort of Kafkaesque nightmare. Phone calls were met with requests for emails, emails to which Banning and his collaborator, a Dutch writer called Will Tinnemans, never received replies. “It was a huge job,” says Banning. “A horror, sheer horror.” In France, the pair pursued underemployed local officials from town to town by car; in China they sat through endless boozy lunches, where promises of help were made and promptly forgotten. In Yemen they sweated for five days on sticky sofas waiting for a minister to sign a permission form: why he’d withheld it and why he ultimately gave it were mysteries Banning never unravelled.