Palmer has written for Mother Jones, Newsday, Newsweek International, Aperture, The Village Voice, The City Sun, Emerge, The New York Times Magazine, US News & World Report, Entertainment Weekly, and others. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, ColorLines, US News & World Report, Politiken (Copenhagen), and many other publications. Sipa Press distributes his photographs domestically and internationally. 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 in 1988 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 and likes to leave the borough occasionally.
Blog Entries by Brian Palmer
Presidential Campaigning on the Down-Low?
As predicted by Obama supporters and detractors alike, the junior senator from Illinois is now catching flak from all sides for each position he takes -- on ethanol; on Israel and AIPAC; on a strategy for ending the US occupation of Iraq; and most recently, his campaign's apparent shunning of...
We Can Help Burma
Posted October 8, 2007 | 05:25 PM (EST)
The word "issue" -- the Darfur issue, the Iraq issue, the homelessness issue -- is kind of irksome, but it hints at a vital fact: As Americans of a certain economic status and social class, our "issues" are other people's lives. As a journalist and as an American, I struggle...
Counterinsurgency for Dummies -- and Chickenhawks
Posted August 18, 2007 | 12:05 PM (EST)
"We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms," Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon wrote in their now famous July 30, 2007, New York Times opinion piece.
"Today, morale is high," they continued. They spent all of eight days in country.
The writers, former...
Training Marines How Not to Kill
Posted July 7, 2006 | 01:41 PM (EST)
The young captain herded the Marines of Fox Company into a semicircle in the sand facing a plywood easel from which hung a sheaf of long laminated pages. The first one read: "Cordon and Search Operations." The men were already sweaty and hot from the desert sun, and it wasn't...
Facts, Fudge & FOIA
Posted March 25, 2006 | 06:13 PM (EST)
President Bush is smack in the middle of another Iraq public-relations blitz, citing the city of Tal Afar as a success story. In the April issue of The Atlantic, journalist Robert Kaplan touts one US Army unit's work in Mosul as a qualified triumph. I have not traveled to Tal...
Last Thoughts of an Iraq "Embed"
Posted February 24, 2006 | 05:42 AM (EST)
Al Asad Air Base
Anbar Province, Iraq
02/24/06
This is my Iraq swansong, Inshallah. I depart soon with the 230+ US Marines and sailors of C Company - Charlie Co. - an infantry element in the 2300-strong 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. They are moving on to other military...
Observations from al Asad, Iraq
Posted February 22, 2006 | 01:38 PM (EST)
Al Asad Air Base
Anbar Province, Iraq
02/22/06
It took me a few moments to realize that the nice men from al Asad Air Base's private security force, SOC SMG, were taking me into custody. The slight but well-armed Ugandan guards who inspected my press ID at the...
Posted June 27, 2008 | 12:35 PM (EST)