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.