The dive took him out of his comfort zone. But Daniel was an elite gymnast who had competed internationally, so it was the simplest thing in the world for him to perform moves like an Arabian Whip Double or a Stretched Whip Flick Double or a Stretched Whip Double Hip with a perfect landing.

Daniel had been competing for years in European and world championships in power tumbling, a branch of gymnastics in which gymnasts perform eight different elements on a fibre track. The dive in Hong Kong added a new height element to his physical abilities. It was frightening at first, but he soon got used to it.

During the six weeks he was working in the theme park, his attention began to be drawn towards the Middle East. In his breaks he read about the revolutions in Syria and Libya in the local English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post. He cut out pictures of demonstrations from Syria and hung them up in the shipping container where the artists rested between shows.

The Syrians were demanding reform and these demands were being met with live ammunition and police violence. When President Bashar al-Assad refused to listen and instead deployed the military and the police against peaceful demonstrators, the protesters demanded the removal of his regime.

The seeds of the war in Syria had been sown.

· * ·

Daniel was born in Brøns, in south-west Jutland on 10 March 1989, the younger brother of Anita, who was seven years older. The family lived in a detached house where Daniel’s mother Susanne also ran a hair salon. His father was a fisherman. Susanne was meticulous with her customer’s hair, a trait which was also reflected in her insistence upon order and tidiness in the home. Daniel was just a year old when his father was diagnosed with brain cancer. One morning in early May 1992 he passed away on the sofa in the living room. His last wish was that Susanne would find a new man who could be a father to Daniel and Anita.

A few months later – and with that thought in mind – Susanne put her grief and obligations on hold for a night and went to a widows’ ball in a nearby town, where she met Kjeld, a tall, handsome man. They were married exactly one year after their first meeting on 11 September 1993 – a date which became a day of happiness in Susanne’s life. She and the children soon moved into Kjeld’s red-brick house in the village of Hedegård, close to Billund in south-central Jutland. Their new home was twenty brisk steps from the yellow house where Kjeld’s parents lived and where he himself had grown up. The couple had a daughter, whom they named Christina. Although Daniel had never known his biological father, he got a new one in Kjeld, who adopted him and Anita.

The family’s single-storey house was surrounded by fields and woodland and had a lawn covered with molehills. There were horses and cows on the neighbouring land and just up the road was the local village hall. Behind Susanne and Kjeld’s house was the big garage where Kjeld’s lorry was parked and where they celebrated special birthdays. The couple added a bay window on to the house and turned the bedroom into a hairdressing salon, where Susanne cut her customers’ hair during the day, while Kjeld made a living as a lorry driver.

Daniel passed his grandmother’s yellow-brick house on his way to Hedegård Free School, where Kjeld had also been a pupil many years earlier. It was on a narrow asphalt road with no street lights. Motorists drove fast out in the country, so Susanne sewed reflectors on to Daniel’s clothes. The neighbours smiled when he walked by and said that he looked like a Christmas tree. Susanne shushed them. If her son heard their jokes, he would rip off the reflectors.

As a youngster, Daniel loved to do somersaults and handstands. Susanne thought it was a healthy hobby and sent him to gymnastics in the neighbouring town of Give. From the floor of the hall, he soared through the air with extraordinary power and it was obvious to everyone that he had elite potential. When he got older, he dedicated himself to developing his gymnastic skills for two years at the Vesterlund sports boarding school, where he lived the disciplined life of an athlete and where, for the first time, he experienced a strange and unsettling sensation over a girl.

Her name was Signe and he loved her freckles, her reddish hair and her round, pale-blue eyes. She was the most talented girl in the school. She did the same jumps and somersaults as the boys, and Daniel noticed that she didn’t doll herself up with make-up and nail polish like the other girls. While in school they were sweethearts, but the relationship petered out afterwards when Daniel became busy with his apprenticeship as a carpenter and training with the national gymnastic team.

It became commonplace for him to be laying a roof on a house with a pain in his back and having to make regular appointments with a chiropractor, until he eventually decided to drop his apprenticeship.

‘I can always find time to become a carpenter. I can’t always be on the national team,’ was Daniel’s answer to his mother when she admonished him about not finishing what he had begun.

Instead, he made unsolicited applications to all the gymnastics schools in Denmark for a position as an instructor. A school in Vejstrup in the province of Funen snapped him up. He taught gymnastics for a year, while also building stairs and mowing lawns, between participating in competitions. He took up photography, too, inspired by the photos his coach took of him as he soared and rotated through the air. There was something in those frozen nanoseconds that fascinated him. They captured the tension in the muscles or concentration in the eyes. So he borrowed Kjeld’s SLR camera, which he took along in his bag when he went to compete in the World Championship in power tumbling in Canada in 2008. He photographed the gymnastics halls and hotel rooms; the bodies in their tight suits and the successes, sweat, somersaults and setbacks that shone out from the faces of the gymnasts. He photographed the gymnastics bubble in which he travelled around the world, and discovered that the camera was a tool he could use to explore people’s lives.

He soon took ownership of Kjeld’s camera, carrying it around with him to every competition. Later, he got in touch with his grandfather’s friend, whose son was a photojournalist. Hans Christian Jacobsen invited him to Aarhus, where he patiently looked at Daniel’s photographs of flowers and gymnastics. Afterwards, Hans Christian showed him his own photographs, which he had taken in some of the world’s most troubled regions. Daniel stared at a photo of a boy who was jumping into a lake somewhere in Kabul – shadows, light, a boy in a ray of sunshine. Hans Christian’s images sparked something in him and all Daniel could think about was getting out into the world and capturing it all with his camera. When he was twenty-one he bought his own camera, packed it in his rucksack and went off with his childhood friend Ebbe on his first trip outside the security of the gymnastics world. It was a journey that turned him upside down in a way that somersaults and back handsprings had never done.

Daniel sat several feet above the ground between the humps of a camel, looking at an expanse of sand in north-west India. The camel-driver was making the journey on foot in his long blue kurta, wearing a broad smile on his chubby face.

When they took a break during their five-day camel safari, Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off the camel-driver. The man would fetch his leather pouch from the animal and take out a few potatoes, a little fruit, some rice and spices, which he would then cook in a pot over a small fire.

‘He can make so much out of so little,’ thought Daniel and he took photos of this simple, quiet life and of the camel-driver, who was at one with the sand and the four-legged animal.