When photography was invented around 1850, it was quickly recognized not only as an art form but also as a scientific and ideological tool. In the immediacy of a photograph, there was not just a document of a moment but a potential to reveal deeper truths—about the world around us, about the way we see it, and about human beings themselves. At the same time, photography became the first medium to democratize art, making it possible for anyone to possess an image of themselves or their loved ones—where previously, a portrait had to be commissioned. It was from these historical reflections that our conversation with the young and sharp-eyed photographer Joseph Cochran II unfolded, when Observer met the artist at “Public Work,” currently on view at Swivel Gallery in New York.
Cochran treats photography as a tool of sociological study. Each picture becomes an epistemology of human existence, manifesting in its being and becoming as individuals interact within society. “For me, photography has always existed in this fascinating space between objective, scientific observation and subjective social commentary,” Cochran told Observer. “That tension is what makes it so powerful.”
Reflecting on how photography and film shaped modern perception and mirrored social structures, Frankfurt School critic Siegfried Kracauer once argued that photography doesn’t just document reality but also reveals structures and meanings otherwise invisible to the eye. The photographer, in Kracauer’s words, is “seeing into the life of things.” A photograph, beyond its surface realism, always holds metaphysical and social depth. By then, photography had already become a tool of sociology. “That type of photography was also drawing from fields like public relations, which emerged in the 1920s, and from efforts during the New Deal to document infrastructure,” Cochran explained. “It was a way to communicate with people, because we could no longer trust drawings or paintings—they were biased. The camera, on the other hand, was seen as impartial, capturing only what the observer saw.”
Following in the footsteps of photography masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and Dawoud Bey, Cochran II approaches the medium through a poststructuralist and anthropological lens, emphasizing the importance of the signified—the “phenomena” that emerge as image and symbol in a fleeting moment. For Cochran, photography is a way to capture these moments when society reveals itself through seemingly trivial, mundane gestures in shared spaces, on the street, during a conversation. His practice blends photography, sociology and radical empathy into a quietly profound form of civic meditation.
His images resonate with both the Ashcan School in painting and the American Realist tradition in documentary photography, each committed to rendering everyday life as it was lived. Like Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Cochran uses the camera both as a record of urban and human life and as a tool for observation and understanding—before offering any critique. For him, photography is at once a social study and social work, an extension of his civic role as an educator deeply engaged with the city’s diverse communities. Photography becomes public work, attuned to the way society moves and breathes, captured in the microdynamics of individual interaction that reflect collective survival strategies. Cochran’s practice investigates how public life is structured, sustained and strained, and how photography, by paying attention to its subtlest cues, might intervene.
“Photography is both the newest and the purest tool we have to record humanity and the life we live, especially in contemporary times,” he reflected during our conversation. “Photography is the newest artistic practice, even if someone might bring up digital art. Photography as an art form is only about 170 years old. We still don’t fully understand its potential.”
Once his photographs are enlarged and installed in the gallery, it’s obvious that Cochran’s work is a direct attempt to bring viewers closer to the truth of contemporary America while intentionally leaving the frame open-ended. His approach resists didactic interpretation, encouraging instead a symbolic, metaphorical and poetic reading that makes room for empathy with the subject.
After all, the paradox of photography lies in the relationship between the sensorial immediacy of the image and object and their symbolic potential, and the final meaning always depends on aesthetic, cultural and ideological context. The medium’s apparent simplicity conceals its deep complexity, particularly its capacity to capture not beauty but those rare moments when things reveal themselves as they truly are, outside any pre-established narrative.
Consider photographs like Chinatown (2019) and Ghettowaser (2019), which are emblematic of the photographer’s role in postmodern and post-digital media culture. They are not merely depictions of urban life; they engage with iconography and painterly references, especially through their use of light and composition, while simultaneously allowing specific communities to speak for themselves. Each invites viewers to explore contemporary rituals and survival practices, attempting to construct meaning from the everyday.
Particularly resonant in its portrayal of today’s confusion and noise is Reality Show II (2021). The image captures the raw intensity of women screaming at each other, trying to be heard as they share their stories, as if caught inside an American reality show where only volume guarantees visibility. It’s a soap opera, a drama in motion, and simultaneously a mirror of contemporary human interaction, especially in the U.S., where people grapple to be heard and to understand their deeper selves within a constant societal performance. And yet, Cochran’s work moves beyond simply documenting the political—it seeks to study human behavior. The political and the economic are embedded, not as statements, but as the lived fabric of daily life, woven into the micro-politics of existence.
Cochran’s understanding of those dynamics is inseparable from his own lived experience. Growing up in Harlem, the son of two drug-addicted parents, he was immersed early in the chaos and hard clarity of New York City. He speaks little of that past, often dismissing it as a collection of distinctive moments—episodes of heightened, often forced, awareness that nonetheless shaped the perspective he brings to his work today.
“There was a brief period of my life where I did not know the future,” writes his gallerist Graham Wilson in Cochran’s most recent monograph. “I sat idly, in reference to both myself and the sedan I nearly lived in, on the corner of Mother Gaston and Sutter Avenue. Commotion ruled my surroundings—ambient sirens and flashing lights, people running from place to place, hustles crowding the sidewalks and a palpable sense of violence in the air. You could almost taste it. It was an unshakable atmosphere…. My acuteness at the time was at its peak, and there was something tangible in that. I performed my duties under a guise, glimpsing into lives I had no part of during my thirty seconds of cash and carry, then moved on. At that moment in my short years, I did not yet know Joseph Cochran II, but I knew his place and disposition. This was Brownsville, Brooklyn—home to Mike Tyson, the 69th safest precinct out of 69 in the city, and home to one of the most dynamic photographers of the 21st Century.”
At one point, Cochran was removed from his precarious family situation by the child welfare system and placed in a Brownsville project. “I was coming from a similar space in Harlem, but I had never lived in the projects before I came there,” Cochran recalled. At the time, Brownsville was the murder capital of America, and that’s where he found himself growing up—alone. “It was like one of the most dangerous places on earth,” he said, describing the project as more like a ghetto. He remembers telling the social workers it was an open-air prison, even without bars or cells. His clarity at such a young age was striking. “I came from classic tenement housing, an idyllic situation, to seeing how people who look like me, and other poor people, are really subjugated.”
That heightened awareness of his surroundings, which now informs his photographs, was born from the danger he experienced growing up. He learned to constantly assess his environment, to remain alert, to observe. At the same time, Cochran reflected, that awareness was nurtured by his grandmother’s peaceful guidance. “She taught me early how to look at the world, trying to understand my place, but also, most importantly, asking why something is the way it is. Asking why.”
Cochran’s childhood may not have been ideal, but his grandmother gave him something more enduring than stability: an existential framework he would carry with him through life and into his practice, fueling his awareness, curiosity and probing engagement with the world. “We used to sit around every day watching this trivia show called Jeopardy,” he said. “It would have random facts and random questions, like, what happened in 1792 in this place? Oh, the French Revolution. And I would ask my grandma, like, ‘Damn, that really happened?’ And she would tell me, ‘Get that book, open to that section, and let’s read about it.’” He began asking her questions about the world, and she always encouraged him to ask more.
“I would ask her, ‘But why did they do this? Why did this happen? Why did that happen?’” he continued, remembering how she always wanted him to keep questioning, even when she didn’t have the answers. “She’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll learn together, you know.’” Cochran never let go of that endless curiosity, and it became fundamental to his artistic process. It’s the Socratic method, he reflected—a form of inquiry that insists on being in a dialectical relationship with the world, observing, reacting and engaging in order to understand it more deeply.
None of Cochran’s photographs are taken without prior human exchange. Each image is preceded by a kind of Socratic ritual: asking questions, immersing himself in the setting, tuning himself to the life of his subjects. Even in the far corners of the world—during his own peripatetic existential search through cities like Shanghai, across islands like Sardinia and through numerous other global settings—the process remains the same.
The Prayer, one of the few images in the show not shot in New York, was taken in Sardinia. To make the photograph, Cochran secured a Freedom of Information Act request from Matteo Salvini’s interior ministry to visit refugee camps. And even amid the weight of that historically situated crisis, Cochran widened his frame to touch on the broader arc of migration and human movement—a theme he returned to in later works, especially in the Mediterranean, most recently at the Malta Biennial.
Like he did on the streets of Brownsville, Cochran today never stops watching or trying to understand humanity’s tragedies as they unfold in unfiltered form. He captures the micro-politics of daily life in real time, preserved not in polished beauty, but in moments of raw and enduring resonance.
“In every project I’ve done, I go to a place, embed myself in that space, and then I just ask, why?” Cochran explained. Walking around Sardinia, for example, he would ask locals, “Why is it that only 1.5 million people live here? Why is it called the Autonomous Region of Sardinia?” In China, he posed pointed questions about politics, history and daily life. “I always ask these simple, apparently stupid questions, which challenge their status quo—the places where they survive every day,” he said. Cochran approaches everyone the same way, without fear or hesitation, regardless of status or appearance. He engages human to human, asking questions that disarm and provoke. “I’ve been in the presence of billionaires, and I’ve been with the poorest people you can imagine, and my skill is that I treat everyone exactly the same.” That sensibility grants him access to a genuine universal spectacle of humanity.
At its most potent and radical, the camera in Cochran’s hands becomes a living archive of joy, controversy and, at times, tragedy. It captures intimate or harrowing experiences and exposes them to the world. These moments are preserved not only as images but also as historical records with traces of lives that might otherwise be forgotten.
For Cochran, being in the world with a camera is to accept a mandate not just to document but to witness and denounce. His notion of photography is a “camera with a conscience,” a tool for voicing the complexity and truth of human experience—in its beauty and in its devastation.
Walking through the exhibition, we encounter the result of Cochran’s relentless humanist inquiry: images that capture both wealth and poverty, the promises of the American Dream and the paradoxes eroding it. His photographs do not hide or sensationalize. He resists the spectacle that media and social media have trained us to expect. Instead, each existential drama is suspended in a single frame, unvarnished, unresolved, allowing the viewer to witness life as it unfolds: unpredictable, contradictory, human.
Since the Malta Biennial, Cochran has experimented with adding vitrines to his exhibitions, displaying data, texts and documents that reveal the broader social and historical contexts in which these personal stories unfold. Alongside the photographs in the current show, a long list of dates is paired with pivotal events from recent history—economic, geopolitical and societal forces that have shaped individual lives. “All is connected. And I can’t tell a full story without showing you as much as I can get of all the elements of that broader history,” Cochran explained.
Yet despite the intensity and depth of the material, Cochran resists using his work as a platform to speak explicitly about his own Blackness. He considers that a limiting frame. Instead, he observes society as a whole, approaching his subjects with a sweeping view of world history. For this reason, he intentionally steps out of the frame. Though he is present during the encounter, the shot and the editing, he keeps his personal narrative separate. “When I’m out with the camera, I’m just an avatar. I’m just a messenger,” he said. By stepping back, he invites the viewer to step in, to confront the image and its humanity directly, and to ask the question he always asks: why?
After all, every photograph is produced by someone, and that act is never neutral. A photograph reflects a specific aesthetic, political or ideological position. Cochran is fully aware that taking a picture is active, not passive, and often, political. Each image contains conceptual frameworks, embedded relationships and layered meanings that link it to its maker and to the moment it was taken. It belongs to a larger system of signification and operates within networks of communication, values and hierarchies. In Cochran’s case, it also reveals them.
“I think it’s about knowing both the story and the history, which obviously has political, social and economic implications. But there’s another thing to understand: contemporary life is history being made in real time,” Cochran reflected. “To understand that to be present in contemporary life is to understand what is happening around you. It’s our duty to this thing called society.”
In an age of hypervisibility and data overexposure—where constant image saturation often leads to audience desensitization—Cochran’s photography emerges as both a call to attention and a call to truth. His work invites us to observe closely, to remain conscious of the history already unfolding in the present and to recognize how our actions—or inactions—are shaping the future.
From this vantage point, photography becomes public work: a sincere exercise in understanding the state of the world and of humanity, and in creating a space for confrontation and dialogue. It is a space that feels increasingly urgent, especially in a time when third spaces—those informal arenas of organic, communal exchange—are rapidly disappearing, and even freedom of speech finds itself under pressure. “Communal life is a negotiation. It’s a negotiation of the micro, what is happening to you, and then the macro, what is happening to us.”
Cochran’s images reject the language of spectacle and the algorithm-driven aesthetic of vitality that dominates social media. Instead, they offer a genuine human encounter with the world—not a vehicle for self-performance, not a tool for mass appeal, but a form of understanding grounded in a dialectic exchange with the other.
Joseph Cochran II’s “Public Work” is on view at Swivel Gallery through August 9, 2025.
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