The Earth: Brian Palmer

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. May 2015. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Interviewed by Andy Dion
Copy Editor: Maggie Boccella

Andy Dion:  How did you get started on your work with the East End Cemetery Project?

Brian Palmer: Essentially, it represents a 180 in my life — and if not a 180, then a ninety-degree turn to an entirely different direction. I was internationally oriented in Iraq, China, and various places for much of my early to mid-career, and then my dad died in 2011. My wife found a photograph as we were sorting through his stuff...a photo of nine old black people, in what looked like a clearing in the woods, standing over two headstones. They were standing shoulder to shoulder. Some people were smiling; my dad was in the photo...he was not smiling. 

That brought back stories he told me about growing up, and about a community that was majority black, just north of Williamsburg, Virginia that was [taken over by the Navy] in 1942-1943. My dad never stopped talking about losing the family’s land in 1943. When he died at 83, he was still seethingly angry that the US Navy came and used the Second War Powers Act...to take it. 

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. July 2016. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Long story short, my dad and eight other black people got permission to visit this cemetery on land the government had taken in 1943. [T]his particular plot of land was part of what is now known as the top secret US Military installation Camp Perry. Once I got permission, I visited, and that’s when this ninety degree turn started to happen — because I saw the handmade headstone of Matthew Palmer. I recognized the name. He’s my great grandfather — not much of my family knew about him, but we started to do a little research. The research said that he was most likely enslaved and had...enlisted in the US Army at the tail end of the war. So for me, at age fifty, learning all this information and all the history attached to it — it just rocked my world. 

My wife Erin and I decided to move to Virginia and unearth this story about Matt Palmer and this hidden community, and then come back to Brooklyn and enter film festivals. We thought we could just wrap it up in two years. We had talked to historians and they would be like, “You know how hard it is to find information about black people who were born before 1865.” Because most of them were property, and there were no biographies unless they were special, very lucky, or both. As we were looking for information, we would have one success and fifty failures. We found Matt Palmer’s union pension application, which was a treasure trove of information, but it was incomplete. 

Evergreen Cemetery, Richmond, VA. Evening on the property line with East End Cemetery. October 2020. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Then we started visiting cemeteries. We’d visit...and find headstones, and these headstones are little texts in a story that has not yet been told. Before we knew what we were doing, we were going to cemeteries knowing there were Palmers in this part of Virginia...and that’s how it started. We learned about a huge sixty-acre cemetery in Richmond called Evergreen Cemetery, which used to have a volunteer community. There was going to be a group of African-American Boy Scouts volunteering to clean up a black cemetery. So think about that — black Boy Scouts pulling...all sorts of crap off of headstones and markers that had been obscured for at least as long as I'd been alive. 

We had a cinematographer who'd flown down from New York to work with us, and I was in heaven. The Boy Scouts and my wife dropped to [their] knees immediately and started working and pulling vine. We got everything we needed for this documentary. After that, Erin said, “We should come back.”
So as we started doing this work with our hands, I started doing what I do as a photographer, trying to document it. What was striking to me is, my mindset is clearly reflected in the images. For the first year and a half, the pictures I took were workman-like, maybe even a little bit distant. They were really straight. I may have gotten some interesting pictures, but for the most part, I was absolutely overwhelmed. I mean, if you've seen those images for 2014-2015, we were dealing with 16 acres of second growth forest.

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. Charles T. Haskins visits graves of his mother and father, Lois and William L. Haskins Sr. August 2020. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

This project grew up alongside that story. The work itself, I think, reflects the way I began to regard what that site was. It took me about a year and a half to truly, viscerally understand what we were doing. We were uncovering history, with our hands, one grave marker at a time. That in and of itself felt important. I felt that as a documentarian, as a citizen, as an African American, as everything that I am, that I needed to dedicate myself to representing what this place was, who these people were, and what it could be. This work, especially in the Trump era, it felt especially important, because all of that white supremacist or borderline racist, exclusionary ideology that was coursing all over us like an overflowing sewer. This truth, these facts, this evidence, these stories in the cemetery felt like a way not just to hold that back, but to reverse it, because the story is at the virtue of being true. And they give the lie to whether it's the monuments, or this idea that only white Americans are full Americans and the rest of us are burdened with hyphens: Black-American, Latinx-American. No, we are Americans. 

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. The burial ground, overgrown because of intermittent and haphazard maintenance by its current owner, Parity LLC. April 2021. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Andy: You mentioned there's a pipeline, like a fish being transferred to and from bodies of water through a tube. I picture you sailing down this path, and then you take a ninety degree turn and shift paths. What manifested this turn?

Brian: Initially, I felt that we were getting sucked into the East End stuff. For a year and a half, I was still trying to figure out what the hell is going on, why we're spending every Saturday there... Even though I knew that these cemeteries were in this state because of structural neglect. It was really difficult and painful. But I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, because we were continuing to hit these roadblocks. To do this work in the cemetery was almost like a placeholder for about a year and a half for me. Once we started nursing a particular story and finding connections between our own stories that were almost accidental, that's when it started to become a story in and of itself. 

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. Courtesy markers in the children’s section. September 2019. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

We are so committed to the journey into the process that we're still trying to figure out what it all means? One of the things that means is that there were connections among people and communities that we had no idea existed. Matt Palmer in Richmond connected to other people, both in East End and folks, Philadelphia, to New York, all over the place. We're learning so much about what the African American community was back at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. That is an amazing education.

Andy: With the cemetery being the primary source of information on Matt Palmer and many others like him, what have you found of your kin from the cemetery?

Brian: In that particular cemetery, nothing. But William Johnson’s headstone is proof that this man existed. At that initial cemetery in Williamsburg, Matt Palmer's headstone: that’s why we started. That tangible piece of our past started us on this journey. That's why cemeteries became so important. You begin to be able to tell stories about the larger community from these cemeteries. You begin to fill out this constellation, these connections between a larger African American community across Virginia and the East. It really is like a puzzle with an infinite number of pieces.

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. Volunteers rinse a headstone that had been buried under soil. July 2016. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Andy: Due to the nodular nature of just how these cemeteries add to this narrative, have you tracked other cemeteries like the East End Cemetery? 

Brian: Yes, but for different reasons. To do the work that we wanted to see, we needed to look for other successful examples of this. That's how we found out about the Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery in Charlottesville, which is a marvelous collaboration between the city of Charlottesville, a grassroots black-led group, and independent philanthropies. Just through our research, we've found our way to cemeteries in Pennsylvania because [of] a pastor, W.F. Graham, who pastored at a church in Philly. We have a great connection with the folks at the Friends of Geer Cemetery, which is a once overgrown historic black cemetery. There are thousands of these sites across the South and across the country. We partnered with an academic named Adam Rosenblat, who was doing research that overlapped with what we're doing. Now we're all part of the African American Cemetery Coalition, a mostly black, but multiracial coalition committed to these sites — not simply because we like cleaning up cemeteries, but because we understand the transformational power in these sites and the power of their stories. 

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. April 2021. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Andy: There's the physical aspect of the restoration project against erasure, but then there is your photographic aspect. How does your photography play into the East End Cemetery Project? Do you believe photography has a restorative power?

Brian: I entered these overgrown cemeteries and saw them as sites of shame, as dead places. Then I started doing the uncovering and formed a community with Friends of East End. We coordinated with about 10,000 volunteer visits over about seven years and had churches and synagogues, young and old, White and Latinx — a community of concerned people. Some have stuck around because they're super concerned, others come in and out, others are one-and-done. But the point is, all of that energy was invested in the site for a reason.

I was bathing in that, and it permeated very slowly, and my photography started to change. I was documenting the kids doing the work I was looking for in my pictures. There's so little movement in cemeteries in general, so Saturday would be big days with the kids, the tearing, and the raking. I mean, it's not exactly World Cup soccer, but I was trying to find life and movement in these spaces that I have regarded as dead, but in doing that, I started to realize these spaces are alive even when people aren't here.

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. Members of the Knight-Pleasants family tend to the family burial plot on Memorial Day. May 2018. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

The shame has gone, but the anger hasn't. I'm still angry that these places get treated differently from other sites — white sites, Confederate sites. I'm still angry that East End Cemetery was regarded as so disposable by the state of Virginia that they put it in the hands of a single white man. I can’t understand that. But do I absolutely understand the power of the place itself and of the place as it's being transformed. I can regard the overgrowth as a terrible thing and I can try and photograph it as terrible, or I can regard it as what it is to see the different forces contending. I can see how families spent so much time and money getting a stone carved, laying in a certain place, maybe planting a cedar tree. During the restoration process, zooming in on the headstones, photographing how nature is contending with all these different forces, how the headstones endure or don't. It is what it is. And yes, I have to use my subjectivity and my creativity to represent that. Because people will look otherwise. 

Andy: Just to confirm, Evergreen is untouchable by Friends of East End Cemetery?

Brian: Both Evergreen and East End are off limits to us now, because we've effectively been barred by the new owner. We're still fighting a number of fights, mostly with the city and state, because they’ve subsidized the acquisition of both cemeteries for the city. The head of a nonprofit created a holding company that has one member — a limited liability company. The state funded him to acquire these cemeteries with no experience, no training. 

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. July 2016 & February 2021. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Andy: There is a realness in many of your photos — and sometimes a humor in disarray. You realize, “that’s life.”

Brian: I'm glad you noticed that because it is purposeful. I owe a great debt to a lot of people I've worked beside who make me think about what I do differently — knowing them and knowing their integrity, and then understanding their processes about how they got to do what they do, and then also being introduced to the work of people younger than me. To shoot side by side with people who are twenty years younger, and then to go to their Instagram feeds...they're doing something I'm not doing and I love it. These people are doing their own powerful forms of inspected expression with different roots in the community. I'm learning with every flip through Instagram, trying not to get addicted when I should be doing my work.

Andy: It's tough, isn't it? Many of us get our news from cell phones. Often, phones have been turned the lens on, frankly, atrocities. As a photographer and photojournalist, can you weigh in on that?

Brian: I'm a photojournalist, I'm a journalism instructor, and I'm a deeply concerned citizen. I think information bubbles are a problem. I think that the best advice is to be skeptical of all media. What I tell my students is, even when you finish writing a story, and if you've tapped into primary resources, if you've gotten collected testimony from a wide range of informants, your story isn't perfect [or] done. There will always be a part of that story that you didn't get. The story lives because it's people's lives.

East End Cemetery, Henrico County and Richmond, VA. March 2021. © Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

Andy: Right, there are bubbles of particular ideologies, and they infinitely feedback loop each other with anger.

Brian: And algorithms that get under your skin. My anti-Trump-ism came from not just a visceral hatred of venal, orange people, but from someone with such a track record. If you lived in New York, if you read Wayne Barrett, if you read or watched anything, you knew that there was no substance there. You knew this person that wrecked the lives of the same people who supported him for president. That's a long way to say that I try and do a thing that I sometimes fail to do, which is to continually examine and interrogate an issue. I just continue to have more humility before it. I can do my best to empathize and understand that, and if I need to act in terms of voting, or something like that, then I'll do that. But I'm going to do it after trying to get information from a variety of sources.