Index
(More to come)
Over the past six years, my photographic practice has always begun with the people around me, expanding gradually toward larger communities and deeper into the social structures they inhabit. From a year-long project photographing my roommate to visiting rural primary schools together; from following a friend's interests to exploring young musicians and independent cultural spaces; from curiosity about my mother's work to learning about Miao medicine. I have always started close, building relationships through photography, and using those relationships as a way into larger structures of knowledge and perception. From Guizhou to Shanghai, and on to the Netherlands and France, I followed my movements to explore what surrounded me, developing my own ecology of practice, coming to understand the particularity of each place and the irreplaceability of each person.
1. Let go of expectations.
Don't approach the people you meet with expectations already in place. If you're held back by the question of whether someone is "worth photographing," you'll find it hard to observe and understand them with patience, and easy to go chasing visual stimulation instead. When getting a good photograph becomes the primary goal, you stop seeing the specific person in front of you and reduce them to a footnote for a stereotype.
2. Choose what genuinely interests you, what has something to do with you.
I wouldn't recommend starting your first project by going after so-called vulnerable groups with no real connection to them, driven by some impulse to pay attention to or "save" others. That's a little presumptuous. Start close. The young people in your class, your mother's friends who gather at her place to talk and eat — these can all be the ground for fieldwork. Learning slowly how to use images to build and explore relationships, to see others while also seeing yourself more clearly, is a slower and more complicated process, but it gives back far more than it takes. And everything you learn carries over into the work that comes after.
3. If you need a guide into the community, find someone whose position matches the perspective you want to show.
All of my own projects have started from existing relationships — a roommate, a friend, my mother. I stay with one person long enough, and then follow them into their world. I've also tried a more functional approach, finding whoever was convenient to bring me into an unfamiliar environment. It made me uncomfortable. I kept feeling like I was using someone's position. I stopped doing it.
But I know not everyone has the time or the conditions to stay put in the field. Sometimes you really do need someone to show you in. In that case, one thing matters a great deal: your guide is almost always the first impression the community forms of you. With the rural education project, for instance, going in through the principal versus going in through an ordinary teacher, a parent, or even a child produces completely different results. The principal is convenient. But if you want to get close to the community, the principal will only put more distance between you and them. What's socially convenient isn't necessarily what serves the work. And this isn't fixed. The right person can change at different stages of the project.
4. You can write a plan and research questions, but in the early stages let curiosity lead.
It's fine to start fieldwork before you feel ready. You don't need everything in place before you go. The advantage is that you won't spend the whole time trying to get answers to a fixed set of questions and missing everything else. Good questions rarely come from reading alone. The field produces its own questions. With Miao medicine, for instance, the books kept cycling through the same worn topics: traditional culture, ethnic minorities, intangible heritage. It was only on the ground that I started asking: how do these people actually live? Who comes to them, and why? Why do they choose to stay? Seeing a specific person and seeing an abstract problem are completely different experiences.
5. Know what role you are entering the field as.
Researcher, collaborator, friend, family? The question of the photographer's position and perspective has always been contentious, especially in fieldwork, where holding a camera is itself a form of power. Handle it carelessly and you end up consuming the other. The actual photographing is always the least important part of fieldwork. If you can't honestly say you'd be interested in this place or these people even without a camera, sooner or later the work will tip over when results don't come.
In my own practice, when photographing Miao medicine practitioners in the mountains, I didn't want to arrive as an outsider or feel like a researcher. So at the start I simply followed them up into the hills to learn about medicinal plants. One of the older practitioners would hold forth until past midnight. The photographing happened naturally. By the later stages they were even seeking out places they thought I'd want to shoot and telling me to go quickly. Ask yourself more often what you can bring to the people you're with, not what you can take. What you need will come. Don't reach for it.
Words make connection easy. But caring in photography means you have to act. You have to genuinely see, genuinely listen, genuinely come to know the person in front of you — only then can you say you care. We have to learn to turn verbal emotional connection into photographic emotional connection. In a long-term project, the relationship between you and the people you photograph is visible in the photographs. It's always there.
Q&A
Q1: What role did you enter the field as, and how did you manage to stay for years in a legitimate way? I can't think of any method other than joining a research project or finding a local job. And where did your living expenses come from? (From someone who really wants to do long-term fieldwork somewhere)
A: Before I answer, I want to ask: what kind of fieldwork do you have in mind, and what do you think of the field that's already around you? I think the essay actually addresses your first question — the answer to how to choose a subject and a place is to choose what interests you, what you love, what has something to do with you. I'd suggest starting close: your hometown, fields that people around you are already working in. Develop the nearby first, then extend outward through the people you meet. That's been my own path — every project I've done has started with people around me and expanded from there. This also gives you a natural role. You're not arriving as an isolated outsider. And it takes care of a lot of the financial pressure too, since staying close to home doesn't cost much. Once you've built up a few projects, you can start applying for larger grants and residencies. My current residency in France came from showing exactly these kinds of nearby projects.
Follow-up from Q1: Thank you for remembering my question two months later. The starting point was an internship at a hospital, which left me confused about how people in China relate to death and illness. Why is the doctor-patient relationship so strained? What are people actually afraid of? I have a feeling that the conflicts tend to cluster around a particular kind of person. What I want to research is how elderly people in communities manage their everyday health — from the herbal drinks they make each morning and the exercises they do, to how they seek treatment when something is wrong: the blind massage parlors in small cities, the traditional medicine clinics, the health supplement sellers. I suppose I'm trying to use this as a way into understanding how different people make medical choices outside of hospitals, and what their relationship to death looks like. I'm not sure if it's because I've been in the same environment since childhood, but I feel stuck. Maybe what I need is something simple and doable that I can act on every day?
A: I feel like what you want to research right now is a little large and scattered. Doctor-patient conflict in hospitals, elderly community health practices, supplements, traditional medicine, massage, attitudes toward death. These could each become their own project. Taken together the scope is too wide and the focus gets blurry. Doctor-patient dynamics also can't be understood from the patient side alone. Behind it are the conditions doctors work in, institutional structures, resource allocation, media, and more. Maybe start by focusing on one group: the elderly people in your community. Find one small question to enter through. When something feels wrong in their body, do they go to the hospital, the massage parlor, or figure it out themselves? From there, make small daily observations, note their health habits, have conversations. Do a short informal interview once a week. The material will accumulate. Once you have real fragments to work with, the larger themes will become clearer on their own. I still believe the nearby is field too. And I believe that anyone who genuinely loves people cannot remain unmoved by what the people around them are going through. Sometimes we just stop noticing because we've been somewhere so long.
Q2: I'm curious how you approach village officials, and how you make contact with parents and school principals.
A: Honestly, a lot of it comes down to luck and timing. From the moment you choose where to do fieldwork, it's worth thinking about what connections and resources you already have access to. If you're not locked into a specific location the way academic research might require, choose the place where you have the best chance of building those relationships — somewhere like your hometown. Then it really comes down to asking around. Go through everyone around you, parents, friends, teachers, anyone who might know someone. For this particular project, asking teachers turned out to be the most promising route, and that's exactly how it worked out. Many universities in China have support partnerships with schools in poorer rural areas, and those relationships can open doors to principals and village officials. For parents it's more straightforward. In remote mountain villages most people are genuinely warm and open. Go knock on doors, bring a small gift that feels appropriate, and many people will be willing to help. If one family says no, try the next. When you actually get there you'll find it's not as hard as it seemed.
One more thing: try to look like a harmless student, not a sharp-eyed photojournalist. People put their guard up around the latter. I've always come across as a bit of a clueless student, and most people have been kind to me because of it. Though to be fair, they were just good people. They kept inviting me home for meals.
Q3: I'd love to know more about point 4, letting curiosity lead in the early stages. How do you actually develop that?
A: I've been thinking about this, and I'd break it into two things. First, when choosing where to do fieldwork, choose something you're genuinely interested in, whether that's a question, a group of people, or a place. Don't let media coverage or outside pressure drive the decision. For most people, the best starting point is still somewhere close to home, not somewhere you have no real connection to. Second, practice being curious about people and patient with them. I've noticed that many people, especially young artists, are missing this. They're absorbed in their own worlds, more interested in expressing opinions than listening, and so people don't interest them much. But in fieldwork, if you don't enjoy observing people, if you don't naturally ask yourself why, it's hard to keep going. I've always believed that no matter how ordinary a person is, they deserve to be seen and understood. Carry that curiosity and respect with you and the questions surface quickly. And those points of interest become openings for conversation. People in these communities, especially older ones, are often very glad to have someone who actually wants to listen.
So if you have that kind of curiosity, always wondering what someone is like, why they're here, how they live, you can be dropped anywhere and find a way to connect with people. And through those connections, bigger questions about the world they live in start to surface. I'll give more concrete examples later, there's too much to say here.
Q4: Do you live locally when you're shooting and doing research? When photographing Miao medicine practitioners, did you stay with them?
A: Yes, I stayed at a guesthouse near the village. I don't think you need to push yourself to live inside someone's home. Having a little space to breathe, sort through files, and collect your thoughts is good. Stay too close and you're socially on all the time, talking every day, and that gets exhausting.