Hilarious Post on Lazy Journalists and Poverty Tourism

Posted here in Vice Magazine.

I think I have a pretty high sensitivity for how Detroit is over-simplified and even sensationalized in the media, as I hail from a suburb 45 minutes on the outskirts of the city. I'm not claiming nativeness, but perhaps the opposite; my sensitivity is heightened merely because I grew up in that donut of affluence around the city that reinforced everything that Detroit lacked with its own sort of tourism: avoid the city, but if you have to go through, take pictures.

That same over-simplification and exotification of misery is latent in lots of media coverage of China. If I see another picture of a traditional hutong fringed by a bunch of sky rises, with the accompanied article that uses the word "paradox" 26 times, I'm going to shoot myself.

24 Hours

24 Hours, Random Storefront, Beijing

If you're ever in Beijing, you should check them out: awesome sound. Really fun and upbeat. What's interesting is that they wanted a pretty plain shot - "we keep the 味道 (flavor) on stage...we're actually pretty boring in real life." They're from Xi'an. Two of them have day jobs; the other doesn't and is looking for a day job. Very down to earth.

Stepping Stones

One of the most rewarding things about the Fulbright grant is the latitude it gives to help out organizations, NGOs and come into contact with a lot of cool work. For instance, a few months ago, I decided to volunteer some freelance photography for Stepping Stones in some promotional ads and their website after reading David Hobby's article on working for free and reaping the benefits.

I was quite amazed not only the extent at which they expanded in a short amount of time, but the limited resources at which they expanded from: no full time staff and an army of committed volunteers.

If you're ever in Shanghai and are interested in helping out or learning more, contact: enquiry@steppingstoneschina.net.

From the website:

"The objective of this project is to assist students in migrant schools in Shanghai to gain interest and confidence in their English language abilities and to help them pass their middle school entrance examinations.

English teaching volunteers are introduced into schools for migrant children in Shanghai.

To date, we are running projects in 18 schools across Minhang, Huangpu, Baoshan, Pudong, Yangpu and Putuo districts. The English teaching standards in these schools are low and the Principals welcome volunteers to teach English to the students and/or the teachers either during the school day or at the weekend.

This programme offers a rewarding way to get to know another side of China’s society and to contribute in a meaningful way to the education of under-privileged children.

An introductory video on Stepping Stones:

Open Spaces

And no hands. I could never have this feeling in urban China and it further accentuates the urban/rural division. I've done the transition between big cities and small villages many times this year in China, but I still can't get used to it. Suddenly, things seem further apart. Life is slower. I can hear the sound of my own voice travel across distances I never thought possible in China. The contrast is just too stark.

Breakfast

I am back in Beijing and eating like none other. Two weeks of porridge and salty vegetables really let you appreciate good food.

Snippets

Apologies to anyone who reads this blog for my infrequent and substance-less posts. I know, I know I take the easy way out: pictures.

But lately, it's been busy, so I'm afraid it's going to be more of that. I'll try to be descriptive though.

A bit of what work/life has been like:

A local village clinic in Shanxi.



Making mantou. Lots of it. Really, a lesson in efficiency: the woman who was teaching me steamed around 15 large mantou in each circular steaming deck, and then stacked around 10 steamers on top of each other. The steaming decks also have tea leaves in them, adding to the flavor.



Local woman spinning string.

Young Nationalism

China 5 Lead Singer: "yeah, we're called China 5."
Me: "Yeah? Why?"
C5LS: "Well, we all love China and we used to have 5 people."
Me: "How many do you have now?"
C5LS: "3."
Me: "Well, why don't you just call you guys China 3 now?"
C5LS: "...."

In all my anecdotal experience, there seems to be a rising sort of national pride in all my Chinese friends. My friend, Anna, charted out her own national pride over time: "when I was young, we Chinese always looked to the West and expected them to lead in everything: science, culture, money, etc. But we've been growing as a nation economically and so I've been more and more prideful of being Chinese. Now, it's like I don't always have to look to the West for everything."

In a way, I think her experiences are somewhat representative of the larger umbrella-conversation of Chinese perceptions of nation-hood and national confidence, particularly those in Chinese youth. Especially in the last few years, I think there's definitely been a giant spike in national pride with the Olympics and the successful space missions. Yet, what's interesting about this sort of national pride/confidence is that I often find it in a demographic of young Chinese who belong to a small minority of liberal, subversive culture. Although the Western analog of this sort of population would be more inclined to be critical of their own country (down with the man, etc.), I find a sort of nationalism (a sort that would be unthinkable in the minds of a similar population of young people in the West) really common here.

Which raises the question: is it *counter*-cultural to be nationalistic as a young person in China?

Mini-Great Wall

Getting Warm in Beijing

Interview with Robert Glenn Ketchum: Conservation, Photographic Activism, and Visual Literacy

I thought it might be appropriate to post this interview on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen.


Robert Glenn Ketchum’s formal background in photography includes study as an undergraduate at UCLA with two of the most respected non-traditional photographic image-makers on the West Coast Edmund Teske and Robert Heinecken. Ketchum was also one of the first photography M.F.A.’s to graduate from California Institute of the Arts, where he later taught for several semesters.

However, it is his interests in color and the natural world enhanced by letter exchanges and visits with Eliot Porter that have defined his career. Ketchum has always felt “compelled” as an American artist to use his imagery, exhibitions, lectures and issue-directed book published to address the political realities of habitat protection, natural resource management, and the preservation of wild lands, which he has done with extraordinary success.

Often supported by major foundations and individuals as diverse as actor, Robert Redford, and William E. Simon, former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Ketchum has used his art to effectively assist the passage of legislation and broaden public perception, while at the same time contributing a distinctive body of fine print work to contemporary color photography.

Since the early 1980’s, Ketchum has also been visiting China on a yearly basis as part of the UCLA-China Exchange Program, collaborating with the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute to translate his photographs into silk hand embroidered wall hangings, table pieces, and standing screens. This completely unique reinterpretation of his imagery in a textile form merges Eastern and Western concepts in art, and the modern process of photography with the 2,500 year old Chinese tradition of silk embroidery. (From his blog)

Can you please first tell a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in (1) photography (2) (what can be only called) environmental activism and (3) China and did those three strands meet independently or together? Which first?

I suppose it started off in a very academic high school being exposed to some important environmental literature – Aldo Leopold wrote “Sand County Almanac” and Rachael Carson wrote “Silent Spring.” Those were really important books to me. When Carson wrote, “if we put chemicals and poisons into the environment, eventually it would poison that environment,” I believed her. At some intuitive level, I knew she was right. In the case of Leopold, he used the word “environment” – it was the first time I saw it in print. He basically said that human beings had a moral responsibility to take care of the environment, and if they didn’t, the environment would ultimately collapse and the humans would go with them. So the “moral responsibility” stuck with me.

And then I got into college and I got into photography. I started with rock and roll bands, but increasingly I saw myself taking my camera out on hikes and backpacks because some friends did that kind of stuff. Right after college, I moved to a fairly rural area – central Idaho – for the reasons of job opportunities and the fact that I knew some local kids. That took me into a very different, wild environment. I found myself taking more pictures of wild places as subject matter. Within 10 years, I had achieved some success and was getting published, but I began to feel that my pictures of the land were just victimizing the very environment I wanted to protect. My work was resource consumptive and was not giving back anything to the environment it was exploiting through sales for my benefit. So I wanted to find some moral way of resolving that problem.

One of the things to keep myself gainfully employed while struggling as an artist to become discovered was doing curatorial work in photography. I could do it pretty well, so I did a bunch of stuff: I was lucky and organized several group exhibitions, as well as discovering some significant vintage private collections. One of those exhibits in the late 70’s was a book and national traveling exhibition about the relationship between photography and the American public’s consciousness with regard TO the environment. Specifically, it detailed a clear history linking photographer’s and the influence of their work on the legislative advancement of the national park concept, the most obvious example of that being the first images of Yellowstone by William Henry Jackson that have been credited with helping pass the National Park Act. As I developed this project, I began to see that throughout history – many times – photographers and their photographs influenced legislative decisions. So, after seeing that history, I became empowered by it: I began to see ways of using my work in a similar fashion. Now, while I still do take pictures of the landscape in a very traditional sense, I have learned combine them with words and media use to drive advocacy issues, in my case, specifically about conservation.

So, that takes care of your first 2 questions. The third one – about China – came more for me as an artist than a conservationist. When I studied photography, I studied with nontraditional teachers and I retained my interest in non-traditional photography, even though I was also doing the more traditional work on behalf of conservation.

So I went to Mexico and did some loom-weaving and Europe and did some rug-making with electronic weavers. And then I found myself in Japan in the mid-80s when the first digital scanner came out. But none of those things could produce the richness of a photograph. The looms were too simple and rectilinear. Electronic rug making was much too coarse. And the scanner just printed on cloth. That wasn’t what I wanted at all – I wanted different textures on different surfaces. But while I was in Japan – I was looking at some embroidered ceremonial robes in a shop and one of the embroideries was clearly from a photograph. It was a crane and I knew it wasn’t rendered from a drawing – it had to be from a photograph.

So I began some research and found out about the various regions in China where embroidery was done. Through an article in the LA Times, I discovered the Suzhou National Embroidery Research Institute (SERI) – which had been created during the Mao era. And in a weird way – and I think you’ll appreciate this as a ‘real world politics’ thing – back in the day during the humble administrators and where the embroidery guilds fought with each other to have clients, it was kind of like arch-rivalry. It was a beautiful peasant craft back in the day: you didn’t’ have to go to college; it was all craft-based. And when Mao came into power and purged the intellectuals, he saw the embroidery as a peasant craft, a working class craft, not as an intellectual craft. So, instead of purging them, he elevated them: he called it the “National Research” and provided government money and housing. And so a lot of the embroiderers were rather well off.

And, when I arrived in 1984, that’s what I found. There was certainly a lot of controversy about working with me [at the Institute] because I was the first non-Chinese to ever ask for such an opportunity. Fortunately, I came through one of the only 3 China-exchange programs that had been created thus far in the U.S.: Harvard had one, Columbia had one and UCLA had one. I came from the UCLA.

You’re probably too young – I mean I don’t mean to insult you – but it’s hard to realize this: in 1983, most of the people in Suzhou were on bicycles.

No worries.

Very few people had cars. It took me three hours to get from Shanghai to Suzhou by train and driving by car was like a country adventure. I did it once and it took like 5.5 hours. You had to wander through the rice-fields and fish farms and there wasn’t a direct route. Everyone was living in the old world stone buildings with no running water. There was only one foreigner-friendly hotel and I was the only non-Chinese to ever come through the doors of the Institute and become a working partner.

Going back to the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute: I hear that you’ve been collaborating with them to translate your photographs into silk hand embroidered wall hangings, table pieces, and standing screens (from his website). This form of reinterpretation with a different medium intrigues me. Who came up with this idea? You’ve talked a little bit about the Mao era and this type of embroidery. Who are the embroideries made for? And what is lost or gained in the process of reinterpretation?

Sure. I’m not sure whom they were made for. When I first got there, there were a lot of embroideries that involved landscapes with Chinese characters sewn over them. I never see these kinds of embroideries anymore. I suspect the characters were political slogans with classical Chinese landscapes behind them. I’m sure they were Mao-isms, and that they were used as part of the sublimation of the arts at the time to put out some of his statements and put them out as great art.

I saw that SERI had already played with the idea [of embroidering from photographs] which is why I sought them out. The way they originally managed rendering from photographs was to use a stitch they invented in Suzhou like drawing with a pencil: they shaded in with needle and thread. They followed the photograph, but close up, it still was a lot of random stitches – it only looked like the photograph from a distance. In considering working with me, many of the embroiderers worried that they would never get the dimensionality of a photograph in embroidery. Traditionally, SERI’s style was to stitch everything in the image. To the Chinese, as I was told, what you’re buying is the embroidery, so filling both sides of the embroidery with stitches is the point. But for me, coming out of a Western art school background where negative space is always used, I said “look, why don’t you use some of the double sided transparency as part of a design?” So, in one of the pieces, we didn’t fill the water in, which was unprecedented at the time we did it. But because of what we did, we were able to see through the piece. It also makes it more textural, and more dimensional because things stand off of the surface. Also, it makes it a bit more like film because when it’s lit correctly, it looks like a back-lit transparency.

In the end, I said, “if you just copy everything down to the last detail, you will really see the photo illusion.” So, there was an argument about whether or not that would happen, and then they agreed to do a piece. And it did work.

So, then we went from there. I wanted to try a lot more things.

Can you talk a bit about the “Grand Canal” project that was a part of the Aperture book called China: 50 Years. Why shoot the canal? How did this project come about?

In the beginning, being excited about being in the country and being a photographer, I was really eager to travel: I would work at the institute and then travel periodically for a month or two. I went everywhere, just so I could get more of a feeling of the country. I took pictures everywhere, but I spent a lot of time in Suzhou, where I would just wander through the streets with a bicycle. Suzhou wasn’t big enough that you could actually get lost, so I would just take off for whole days. It was impossible to not photograph the Grand Canal or the side canals, because the whole city was one of the greatest canal cities IN all of China. And it was going to be all changed, as you all know; it’s been completely transformed. So, I wanted to take as many pictures of this version before it was gone.

Now, the Grand Canal has been all cleaned up; the pictures that I took aren’t like what it’s like now. They said that it was too smog-producing and looked too decrepit. Now, it’s completely different and it’s now used for dragon boats for couples who are on honeymoon bliss and all that.

Was it a personal project at first or were you commissioned to shoot it?

Yeah, it was just me taking pictures at first. Then Aperture saw them and they were going to do that book and thought that it fit in very nicely.

China is and has been growing at an unprecedented pace. I’ve heard that certain up-and-coming cities have a slogan that characterizes their development as “development without tears,” referring to their lack of preservation and willingness to tear down old things. As a natural landscape photographer, what made you attracted to (and not repelled by) this country?

Oh, I’m not repelled at all with this country. I love the Chinese sense of self and style and I love Chinese food. And I love ancient China, but I could see what was going to occur. I believe that, as an artist, a lot of what you do relates back to the way you see the land. As a landscape photographer, and someone who appreciated Chinese art, it was interesting for me to go to the country and see the place where many of the first landscapes as art were created. At one point, during college at UCLA actually, we were studying drawings from a Chinese painter who had painted at Mt. Wangshan. Of course, the mountain has stairs all over it. But in art history (this is in 1968), I was told by my professor that the paintings were fanciful landscapes dreamed up by these artists to glorify the countryside and make their patrons happy. Of course, when I got to China, I found that that wasn’t the case at all; the paintings were drawn from real life.

They were real. That’s interesting.

Right! And what a European-centric view of the world that was, to completely misunderstand representational drawing. So, those discoveries were really exciting for me. So, it occurred to me that if China came forward into the new world economy and that the shackles of the Mao era were gone, a country that was so large and that had so many resources and so much intelligence was going to be a huge force in the world. I knew that there was no way that this country was all going to live in waterless, heatless stone buildings. I knew this would all change. Bicycles would give way to cars and all that inevitable stuff. I guess I wanted to photograph as much as possible before it disappeared. Looking back on it – now I’m not a journalist – and looking at what I saw, I realize that I missed a lot of stuff. I didn’t realize how big the change would be. I didn’t take enough pictures.

Right, so as a photographer, how do you decide what to shoot? Is there a lot of pre-photography research that goes into researching what is going on, or is it more organic (walking around, talking to people, etc.)?

It’s much more organic: I walk around, take pictures and base it more on instinct. I would see huge changes everything time I came back. And with each return, I thought “Oh, my God, I need to take pictures of this before it’s gone.” So, I think if I had more of a journalist instinct, I’d have done even more. But as it was, just because I was there, the pictures have some value.

As China changes and grows, what is the photographers’ role in the midst of all of it? Do you think the photographer’s role, in the context of China, is primarily journalistic?

Again, because I’m not a journalist, and because I’m not trying to record the story and am just trying to take pictures, it’s very clear now that I don’t have that intent. Standing outside of the cities and seeing them change, I’ve kept up with that [taking pictures]. So, I’m just continuing to do that. Every time I go back to Shanghai, I go to the tall buildings and photograph in all four directions. In my first photographs of Shanghai, the Peace Hotel was the only place you could stay, everyone on the Bund was wearing blue and grey, and Pudong was a rice patty. There was no bridge across the river to it. Now, the largest buildings in the world can be found there. If anything, China’s more alive and full of color then any country in the world right now; the idea that they were all dressed in drab greys and blues is quite funny. But just by being there, and you look at the span of time that my pictures were taken, you can really see Shanghai moving from ancient to modern.

In terms of your environmentally-oriented work, would you characterize your work as having a message that’s more open to interpretation or one that has a message that’s rather sharp? How do you reconcile the line between passive observer and activist?

Within North America, my message is pretty sharp. My projects are connected specifically to legislative acts, or attempts to pass conservation law or protecting wildlands – things like that. Most of my work is quite specifically pointed. I don’t do political work outside of the United States because, until recently, I thought that I would not have as much influence outside of the U.S. But in the last decade, that’s changed: photographers are out in the international arena making a big difference. They’re leading the way with good conservation photography. They’re funded by groups like National Geography and people who can really help with their money to make a difference.

But back when I started doing this, where I felt I would get most effect was inside my own country where I knew the political system. Within that, I’m very political. Outside of it [the country], I’m more of an observer. Yes, I’ve gone and seen Three Rivers Gorge and have seen the cities transformed, but my mission isn’t much to comment about it as it is to observe it occurring.

You mentioned a lot about how photographers are out shooting and making a difference, even legislatively, and that this is a fairly new thing. Can you talk more about this?

Well, I think the growth of the idea that photographers could be advocates for the environment started in this country [the United States]. It started off in the late 70s. If you looked at some of the acknowledgements that I’ve had, you’d be inclined to think that I was a part of this group. I think it was really 10 photographers my age: we had all been out there working on issues of our concern regarding the planet. And now things have changed. For instance, National Geographic used to be a fairly neutral magazine that never took a controversial point of view. But once the environment started to significantly deteriorate and the scientists started to say that this was happening, National Geographic started to have a lot more political intent. 12 or 15 years ago, this just wasn’t the case. Even young photographers from other countries are coming into the fold everyday and saying “hey, I don’t just want to take calendar pictures; I want to take pictures that make a difference.” They’re joining with groups like the International League of Conservation Photographers and working with Conservation International and their pictures are becoming more and more valuable to the media in promoting and furthering conservation research around the world. And again, it’s not just American photographers. And this has been happening almost exponentially. It probably drives the politicians crazy; I know that it at least drove the Bush administration crazy.

I see the troupe “old and new” in a lot of the work of photographers who photographed China in the 80s and 90s and even today. Do you anticipate or see any trends or memes in photographers working in China today? Or in the future?

The Chinese are brilliant. It’s mostly that they’ve been sort of contained for a while and it’s just recently that they’re really exploring their brilliance. They’re coming online with successful new ventures. Within that, young Chinese artists – especially the ones embracing the avant-garde, and the conceptual, and modern photography - have shot right to the top of the art world. So, they’re really getting the top accolades. They’re already ascending stars.

I think, quite frankly, the depth of culture in China gives a tremendous platform of things for a Chinese artist to work with and borrow from and mock and aggrandize: 5000 years of cultural history and lots of art connected to it opens the door for a lot of cross-bred ideas. There’s no reason that the Chinese as contemporary artists should not be at the forefront of everything.

Within the world of photography, that’s just a small part. The greater world of photography is expanding in different ways now. I think I see a kind of populism in China that is increasingly becoming somewhat democratic: when it’s treated badly, it protests to the government. Admittedly, the government still has some harsh responses to that, but at the same time, corporations who had dye factories who poisoned streams have been punished; CEOs are being put in jails and companies are closing down. So, it’s clear to me that China is very aware that coming into the 21st century and having a population as large as it has is going to have toxic by-products of epic proportions. It’s not stopping them from going there [toward development]. But its making them think about how to resolve those problems while they’re going there. So, yes, you do have terrible air and water pollution around industrial centers, but at the same time the government has realized that this isn’t sustainable: it can’t stay the way it is. And so they’re actually doing more to resolve that, then, say, the Bush administration that just pretended like it wasn’t happening. So, I think they’re taking those problems seriously and working to fix those problems because you realize that there’s a cost to them.

Right. There really is an advantage sometimes to an authoritarian regime, because if something is on the agenda, then things get done really, really fast.

Yes! Absolutely, right. And at the public level, because of the visual literacy of a lot of new technology like cell phones and cameras, the public is really beginning to respond to the government in ways that weren’t possible before. They’re also able to get the news outside of the country and make embarrassing circumstances for the government in ways that weren’t possible before too.

In terms of visual literacy, with much of the population still in rural, underdeveloped areas, what portion of the population is actually visually literate?

If we’re talking about intellectual literacy, perhaps not [much]. But even in some very rural places: suddenly, people have a cell phone or television set. Now, with that cell-phone – and when I’m talking about visual literacy – a rice farmer without a great education whose rice paddy is being poisoned by a factory upstream can take his cell phone, take pictures, show somebody at a university who is more connected, and all of a sudden, they start a small revolution. And finally, the factory is closed. There’s a kind of weird, new visual literacy in which the ability to make a record in a way that “uneducated people” couldn’t before is suddenly a whole new weapon. And they really get it. When the Earthquake happened, look at all the internet information that leaked out from cell phone pictures and Skype telephone networks. There was no keeping the cap on anything. With all of this new technology, for whatever it’s worth, the authoritarian government, to some degree, has to let the cat out of the bag. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to totally control it the way they did before. Also, a lot of this has to do with the fact that Chinese are internet players of the first class.

In terms of the internet or visual literacy, Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a Professor at the University of Hong Kong and who writes a fantastic blog about China and the internet, makes the argument that the internet often doesn’t democratize China because, while the amazing amount of chat rooms, posts, and pictures are stirring up a bunch of energy, the internet is often merely a safety valve that the government uses as a receptacle to contain complaints without any institutional change. What would agree or disagree with that?

Well, I would agree in that context. However, while it’s doing that, somewhere within that, an advocate is born. You never change the entire public, but you can change, say two out of 200,000 and they’ll become cultural leaders. It’s a fishing game. I’d say that generally, she’s right: it’s useful for the government to allow people to vent without taking to the streets. At the same time, more information is in more hands, and it may appease 98%, but for 2%, there will be no appeasement. You breed appeasement, but you also breed long term heroes.




What do you guys think? As news organizations like the New York Times are posting articles about China's visual history, (specifically, today's) how important is visual literacy and how does this affect the life of the average Chinese?

More Mohawks, Please.

I wonder what the guy with the mohawk's morning routine is like.



Demerit, D22, Beijing.

Tilt Shift

Island in Houhai



Bike




China's net-nanny just recently blocked blogspot in China. To my China readers, how are you seeing this page? RSS feed? Or proxy?

More 3-Dimensional News, Please!

"It comes with being a rising power," my friend responded as we talked about the subject of "why the West's journalism had such a slant against China." 

It's true. Perhaps this was most evident during Olympics season of last year, when respected news organizations like the New York Times ran pages after pages that had one, overall political statement: as China rises, it doesn't mean good things. And while a lot of these stories were deserved and true (milk scandals, workers rights, etc.), many of the stories were simply reflective of the news organization's own political leanings, often being not more than a reporter going into China and looking for anything that might give the Western media another inflammatory excuse. 

I recently saw a news clip that reminded me of that feeling I had last year. The clip is a reporter in Sichuan, reporting on the one year anniversary of the May 12th Sichuan earthquake.

The crux of the video revolves around the resistance that he receives when he tries to interview a family whose daughter was killed in the earthquake. 

Please don't misunderstand me: I think China has a lot of transparency issues. I am not saying that it doesn't. But there are a few things that make me angry about this particular style of reporting:

1. It's been done. 

It makes me question the reporters role as unbiased watchmen when they are clearly looking for a particular bent on a particular story: "despite repeated petitioning attempts, family X has still been ignored." Yes, we've seen this story. It's not only a style of fit-to-mold journalism that is boring, it's simply uncreative: perhaps the thing that saved this reporter from producing yet another Sichuan story of an angry family is the very sensationalism (violence) that precluded his reporting.

2. It tries to make connections to Communism and the CPC that are dubious, at best.

I'm not sure if I'm more irritated at the sensationalism of it or the misrepresentation. "This is how the Chinese government responds...," the reporter said, pointing towards the crowd of suspicious people surrounding him. Really? The Chinese government? If you take a look, he was surrounded completely by plainly dressed Sichuan locals, suspicious of foreign reporters and how they are being portrayed by the West. If you listen closely, the only police officer in the video is telling the locals "don't hit him." 

I am not trying to justify violence. But this is akin to a Chinese journalist, going into the Bronx to report, subsequently being an idiot, getting beat up by a gang there, and then blaming the U.S. Government, capital G. 

I'm sorry, but we have to differentiate three agents here: (1) the reporters stupidity at probing into a story in a way that is obviously inflammatory; (2) Chinese locals' suspicion of foreign reporters; and (3) the Chinese government. Only #1 and #2 were at play here.

3. It represents an already over-saturated segment of Western media that takes a thin slice of Chinese issues (corruption, suffering youth and migrants, scandal, Olympics gluttony, etc.) and tries to distill it into an umbrella-description of China's dominant political party: Communism is the devil. 

Trying to defame the Chinese government with Sichuan? Really? If anything, I think the Chinese government is giving too much attention to Sichuan. While I believe that the heroic acts of that day and manifested compassion were and are good things, I also believe that the Chinese public at large are so puffed up by a sort of euphoric, nationalistic memory of compassion that political leaders are forced to give Sichuan a higher priority than it really deserves: a full 25% of the late 2008 Chinese stimulus investment portfolio (4 trillion rmb) is being used on the rebuilding of Sichuan. 

I get what he was trying to go for: China has transparency issues. I agree. But why not talk about something else then? Instead of using a poorly shot youtube video of a sensational run-in with locals, why not talk about something more interesting and representative? Like a nearly silent May 4th movement anniversary? 

More than the barefaced simplification of a complicated issue, more than the caricaturization of an already 1-dimensionally-represented issue, I'm angry at this type of reporting because of the oppurtunity cost: there are so many more interesting things going on in China outside of antiquated descriptions of Communism or feeble attempts to vilify a party that is already very self-conscious of its image in the foreign media. 

But it seems as if the ratings-based draw to feed upon already-old misperceptions of authoritarianism wins yet again.

in the dark

Migrant Village, Northwest Beijing

Interview with Brian Palmer: Humility, the "Expert Mentality" and the Creative Edge

Brian Palmer is a photographer and writer based in New York. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, US News & World Report, and other publications. His piece, Digital Diary: Witnessing the War, is included in Democracy in America, a project by PixelPress. Sipa Press distributes his photographs domestically and internationally. He has written for Newsday, Newsweek International, Aperture, Fortune, The Village Voice, The City Sun, Emerge, The New York Times Magazine, Rutgers Magazine, US News & World Report, Entertainment Weekly, and Savoy. Palmer is a member of the Photography & Imaging Department faculty at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He lectures at The School of Visual Arts' MFA Photography, Video & Related Media Program.

From 2000 through 2002, Palmer was a correspondent for CNN. He was a Staff Writer at Fortune from 1998 to 2000 and Beijing Bureau Chief for US News & World Report for the two years prior to that. Before serving as US News's China correspondent, Palmer was an Assistant Editor on the magazine's international desk, and a staff photographer for the magazine. He began his career in journalism as a fact-checker and freelance everyman at The Village Voice.

Palmer earned a BA in East Asian Studies from Brown University and an MFA in Photography from New York City's School of Visual Arts. In the mid-1980s, he studied Chinese language and history at Nanjing University in the People's Republic of China.

He lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is a Sagittarius.

"I search for the essential human elements in each situation I encounter. I have developed and followed other threads as a journalist and image maker, but I return always to the person I am meeting, framing with my camera -- not simply as a subject, but as an individual. It is through such people that I learn about local reality. It is then my job to connect this reality to the global one." -- BP (From his website; pictures from Asia Society)

Just as a forewarning: most of the things I’m going to ask you will be about your experiences with China. I hope that’s okay. You can respond any way you like, but I just wanted to let you know that, as I know that China is only a small part of your body of work.

Understood. And just so you know: it’s been quite some time since I’ve been in China. My last trip back was in 1999.

Ok, that’s fine. Can you please first tell a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in (1) photography, (2) writing and (3) China and did these strands meet independently or together? Which first?

That is an interesting, but slightly complicated question, but I like the way you break it down. Number 1, photography was a hobby I inherited from my father. He was an avid “shutter-bug” as they called them back then. He had this wonderful Nikon F 35mm SLR. As a little boy, I coveted that camera. He would take trips in the summer to Africa and come back with slides and, you know, beguile us with pictures of Sierra Leone and Ghana. So that was where the initial interest came from. I did all the standard things: I did yearbook photography and I set up a darkroom in my attic.

I didn’t get back to photography until college. I went to Brown and they had a cross-registration program at RISD. Here’s where the writing and Chinese part comes in: I was studying Chinese at Brown. I went to a public school in New Jersey and we had one instructor – a math teacher, actually – who was a native Chinese speaker and he did a one-day seminar in Mandarin. We got Chinese food for lunch. So, I was hooked from one might say a very “visceral” point. But when I got to Brown, I decided that I didn’t want to continue doing what I was doing in high school: studying French. I felt myself awakening as a person whose forbears come from a part of the world that is not really considered to be important. And at the time, China was doing a lot of aid and sort of launching diplomatic initiatives with the developing world. It sort of styled itself as the leader of the “non-aligned” nations. It was sort of going back and forth with India for that mantle. I thought it was just interesting to avoid the whole Western, Euro-centric dynamic and study Chinese. I had opened the course listings book and I was looking for anything non-Western. Chinese coupled with my experience in high school with Mr. Chu (the math teacher) and some exotic flirtations with Bruce Lee, but I did understand enough to realize that Mandarin (or some form of Chinese) was spoken by 15-20% of the planet. And it was a good point to start my exploration of the non-European world. So that’s the Chinese part.

The photo part was resurgent – almost as a reaction – to what I was doing at Brown. I was writing papers, and I was essentially trying to “figure out” China. I was very, very young and this idea that our essays were supposed to “solve or encapsulate particular issues about China” was really limiting to me. I felt like I needed another avenue to express what I was discovering, particularly about China. I studied as an exchange student at Nanjing University in 1984 and again here I was, in this political science/history mindset in this program, being told “this is Deng Xiaoping’s China; this is what’s going on with jingjigaige and duiwaikaifang and we want you to write position papers on this.” This was a sort of a heady enterprise for a junior in college and it felt incredibly constraining compared to what I was seeing in the streets in Nanjing in 1984. I mean, it was a remarkable time to be there. We were there for National Day in 1984 – a whole lot was happening. The economic reforms – which had been in place for quite some time – were just being codified. I was not a great photographer, but I was running around the streets trying to photograph the contradictions: the old and the new, the Maoist and the Dengist, the things I didn’t quite understand just yet, but thought were cool like people in Mao suits, traffic jams that consisted of bicycles, all these things that were new to a kid from Jersey. All this stuff – it truly complimented what I was trying to do as a budding historian/political scientist. So, cut to almost 12 years later when I became Beijing Bureau Chief for U.S. News and World Report, I had started out my career as a photographer/freelancer and gradually moved toward doing both: I sort of switched back and forth. One of the “threads” throughout my career is this inability to settle on one thing or this desire to express myself to both text and picture. When I devoted myself solely to pictures as a staff photographer for U.S. News and World Report (which I did from 93-96), I felt a little bit limited and constrained because I was putting my photos into someone else’s stories and into a context of a rather staid, middle-of-the-road magazine. So, when I became the Beijing Bureau Chief after a few years of doing other stuff, I thought it’d be great to write stories and then also do as much of the shooting as possible. That didn’t really work out to be the case, but I was able to hire many local photographers and work with some really great people. But I still felt that need to do a “left-brain right-brain” thing to express myself visually in a way that I could simply represent the contradictions or the confusing/exciting juxtapositions that I saw in contemporary China, without having to do what I was doing in print, which was boiling it all down for a readership who didn’t really know much about China and who didn’t really care about the nuances of China. Most of our stories are from the point of view of the American business man in China and the sort-of “Beijing vs Washington, zero-sum game politics.” That was a very long answer.

In terms of writing and photographing, I feel like I meet a lot of photographers who only want to take pictures and writers who only want to write. Of course, this is due to people being loyal to their craft, but why did you decide to do both? How do you reconcile this combining act?

I feel like we could have had a very fruitful and possibly heated discussion about this perhaps 10 or even 5 years ago, but now, with the advent of digital technology, to only do just one thing is essentially professional death. So you have to be able to write and shoot, or shoot and edit, or write and edit – there has to be an “and” to what you’re doing. So, yes, I did feel my efforts were split and divided sometimes. Initially, I tried to write and shoot almost at the same time and that was just nuts. For me, shooting and writing were essentially left and right brain activities – I might just not be that smart that I could multitask that effectively. But I really need to retreat into a world of light and shapes to make a really good frame and continue to make pictures; whereas, to capture an exceptional story, you need to be present with your subject. You need to listen to the nuance. I found that exceptionally hard [to do both at once]. As you say, there’s only 24 hours a day. If it was a breaking news story, something that I couldn’t’ spend a lot of time on, I’d just hire another photographer to do the shooting. If I could stretch it out over a longer period of time, I’d try to do both. I think I was moderately successful in doing that.

As I said, nowadays, you have to be able do all of these things, if not simultaneously, than in series. It is very hard. Just in terms of the way that I shoot, I noticed that if I’m not really immersing myself in that visual experience, I can get very literal and not find a very unique and remarkable pictures, which, as you know, takes time and a different kind of “being present”: being present in place and really working through visual issues (time of day, where the light is coming from). When you’re on deadline, you’re just like, “I just have to have pictures.” It’s a really difficult balance and it’s something that I have to wrestle with every single day.

Let’s talk a little about your “Learning China” series that was a part of the Aperture book called China: 50 Years. Why call it that? And was this particular series a product of planning or more so because you had a lot of pictures from your frequent visits?

Very excellent questions. The “Learning China” series was from the fact that I had been in China for two years and was asked to contribute photographs by the editor of this book – a woman named Peggy Roalf. I had done some picture gathering and research for her. She asked to see my work and I was very honored. When I talk about that other type of shooting I was doing – not shooting on deadline, but really trying to see things in a visual and intelligent way – that’s where the title comes from. No disrespect to my colleagues, but so many people spend a few years in China and write a book and claim to know everything about China. They make prescriptions and prognostications about China and China’s future. And I didn’t feel up to that. I wanted to maintain a respect and a humility, hence the name “Learning China.” This idea that I could come up with definitive statements about “what China means and is” is tremendously hubristic. It’s also just bullshit. If I tell you where I’m coming from and the limits of my experience and ability and then I tell you what I actually know and have seen, then I think that builds my credibility and establishes integrity. I’m not pretending to be an absolute fluent expert, China-expert, long-term resident. I was a journalist who paid attention who had mediocre (at best) Mandarin skills, but who worked at it, and who tried to stay humble before this incredibly complicated nation, culture, civilization and people.

You said somewhere else that “It seems that every American who has spent more than 10 minutes in China feels qualified to write a book about it.” What do you think the learning curve is like in China? I feel as if there is this type of temptation to be more of a mouth than a pair of ears: to synthesize things too quickly. However, another fear is that, as China moves at an incredible pace, your experience is only applicable to that point and time in China. That is to say: if you don’t commit your thoughts to paper, it won’t be relevant later. While you were there, how did you balance the two? How did you maintain a creative edge and produce, and still be a pair of ears?

Well, to your point about the changeability of China: China is going to change whether I write about it or not. Also, I’m not saying that waiguoren (foreigners) and foreign journalists shouldn’t talk about China. I’m talking about a particular type of treatise or polemic – an attempt to reduce China to a certain, simple set of aphorisms and policies and then neatly plot a future for the nation. There are people who have studied China for ages who can come up with a cohesive and coherent, intelligent argument and then go write a book. However, we could also name those books by people who have cobbled together observations and quotes that reflect the point of view that they started with. Then, they get a publisher and publish a book. That’s great for them. I’m being very dismissive about this latter approach. There have been amazing books by talented journalists. I’m not dissing those books. What I’m saying is that, given my limited amount of time and the way that I’m wired personally, I’m more inclined to ask questions and raise contradictions and not to try to paint things as black and white. To be specific, in 96, 97, and 98 – all these amazing things were happening: Deng Xiaopeng died in 1997, the Hong Kong hand-over happened, etc. I just felt like “I have to ask people involved in this story – Beijingers, Hong Kong people. I have to try to represent what these people are going through.” Yes, you have to talk to experts and government officials, but the most valuable role I could play as a journalist was as a conduit for the testimony of actual stakeholders, rather than injecting myself as an authority and then representing myself as such, then packaging China up for a foreign audience. If I hadn’t represented the grey areas, the essential nuance (what is more nuanced than China’s economy?), then I wouldn’t be doing my job. I felt that there was a need to first show people that kind of stuff – the things that we don’t know – and then perhaps pontificate a few years down the road.

How did I remain the creative edge? Get out of my office, take the subway a few stops later, and go to parts of Beijing that (at least at that time) weren’t so fabulous. I would walk through the streets and hutongs and go look and see. And that’s also how I stayed humble before China, because I could go write these stories and theories, but then you go out into the real world and then have all that stuff challenged in a really marvelous way.

Yeah, I love that mindset. It seems to really honor complexity. However, were you ever afraid that all your on-the-ground, anecdotal stories never would really galvanize to anything besides just a jumble of stories?

Well, I still worry about that. I fought against that packaging mindset, but that’s what you do (to package) in weekly journalism: I tried to quote intelligent people who knew what they were talking about. So what I was doing for U.S. News was very different as an independent photographer in my own time, which was to embrace the nuance, the complexity, as you say, and almost have that be a counterpart to some of the work that I was doing for the magazine.

You said in the introduction to the series that “To most Americans, China is a giant, vexing puzzle. But beyond its daunting linguistic and cultural barriers, China is a strikingly ordinary place.” You wrote that in 1999, I believe. Do you feel the same way? What did you mean by this?

Well, I still feel the same way. So many people have this tendency to exoticize places, whether it is China or Iraq. They go to places where there is this tremendous linguistic divide and they then style themselves as the “intrepid interpreters” of these incredibly foreign cultures. My point is simply that once you go to a place and if you make attempts to actually reach and talk to people, understand how they live and deal with their concerns, you’ll realize that things are different; but there are also so many fundamental similarities. If you take the time to get beyond the things that are superficially different, you’ll learn about the commonalities. That’s why I said “strikingly ordinary”: people have fundamental daily needs just as we do in the US of A. I’m not trying to be all “Kumbaya,” but I’m reacting very powerfully against this historical tendency to see China as inscrutable and all this other stuff. It’s partly chauvinism, racism, etc., whatever you want to call it. But it also perpetuates this culture of “the expert”: “I speak a bit of Mandarin and have spent some time in China, therefore, I can set myself up as the interpreter of this ‘wacky culture.’” I’m not trying to claim that “we’re all the same – ebony, ivory and sandalwood.” I’m saying that if you put in the work of actually engaging with people, you’ll be struck by the similarities and then the differences will also make more sense to you. If you understand what someone’s culture is and what someone’s concerns are, you’ll begin to see them as a logical, rational actor. Not everyone’s perfectly rational, but if you understand the context in which someone is living, you’ll have a lot more insight into their behavior, their action, into their hopes and dreams.

Back to the “expert mentality,” particularly perhaps 10 years ago, when there simply weren’t that many Westerners here as there are now. Do you think this mentality is dying as more and more Westerners come?

I think there were a heap of Westerners across China in 99. I should be responsible and careful to say that there are brilliant scholars, journalists, historians and analysts of China (although I hate the term “expert), many of whom are American: Elizabeth Economy, Nick Lardy – people who I  think they have tremendous knowledge, insight and judgment. I’m putting the word “expert” in quotes: the sort of instant expert who sort of opines without doing the foot work. I think that that form of instant expertise will be here forever, and it’s probably even more prevalent with the internet. I think those voices will continue to proliferate, but I also think that those who really have something to tell us about China will rise to the top. It’s up to serious observers and listeners to wade through that noise. I just think that it’s just a slightly more “noisy” atmosphere than it was 10 years ago.

People have been saying “it’s a historical time to be in China” for at least 30 years. Do you think it’s still an amazing time to be here? How much of this is hype?

I guess history depends upon where you stand. Because of the pace of change, it’s almost like every moment feels sort of “momentous,” for a lack of a better word. That may be inescapable in a country with such an incredible dynamism. There also might be a lot of that inevitable “exoticism” of a place that we don’t understand. For us outsiders, China would appear less magical if we understood more about it. That doesn’t take away from the incredible economic growth, but some things stay the same: 20 years after Tiananmen, there really isn’t a real verdict outside of the party verdict. Some things are really glacial in some areas.

Part of the emphasis we give to China is natural, inevitable and earned. But part of it comes from our profound lack of understanding about what China really is. I mean, we have no fascination whatsoever with Congo or Rwanda and fairly momentous changes have been happening there. There’s simply less money, other aspects of race, and all sorts of things [there]. Granted, those countries aren’t world powers who have substantial amounts of money invested in the United States. So, there is some hype and a tremendous amount of reality attached to the China story.

Did you say that you perhaps want to go back?

Yeah, I would love to. I got really sidetracked and captivated and enmeshed in Iraq since 2004. Any available income, time, whatever that I’ve had has been invested in finishing my documentary about Iraq, and writing about Iraq. I feel as if it’s been an amazing way to give up 5 years of one’s life.

On the subject of “being side-tracked,” I get that feeling quite a bit in regard to living in China. There’s simply a lot that is interesting. As a photographer and writer, how did you decide on what to invest in and what to table while you were there, without feeling like a chicken with its head cut off?

Well, it was probably a very similar process to you: I did feel like the head-less chicken almost all the time. There was always the feeling like I was missing the boat or not doing the right thing, but in the end, I think my preoccupations paid off: the stories that I pursued then certainly didn’t become stories that went away.