“City Life Shouldn’t Be Owned”: Photographer Joseph Cochran II Wants a New York for the People

It’s Thursday afternoon in Lower Manhattan, hours before photographer Joseph Cochran II’s debut solo show Public Work opens at Swivel Gallery. He’s mid-conversation, vaulting from marijuana to Morocco to a middle school graduation at St. Peter’s Basilica. “I was just bopping along Fifth Avenue,” he says of the show’s centerpiece, an adolescent wealth parade of pastel blazers and polished loafers. “And like most things that attract my curiosity, I’m like, ‘I’m going to go check it out.’” That’s Cochran’s method: enter, absorb, shoot.

A born-and-bred New Yorker, Cochran’s eye has been shaped as much by his roots as by his time spent in Shanghai, Brussels, Harare, and on the campaign trail for City Councilmember Chi Ossé. He’s tried quitting photography—dabbling in teaching, activism, and local politics—but the work keeps calling him back. Public Work, on view until August 9th, is a granular, no-frills chronicle of the city’s natural bureaucracy: educators, drug dealers, transit workers, entertainers, chefs, sanitation crews, cops, hedge funders, strippers, and everything in between. The images don’t posture or gesture—they register presence as fact, revealing the raw mechanics of civic life and survival.

Photography, he says, is a grounding force. “When I didn’t have anything, it was the thing that kept me going every day,” he told me at the show’s opening last week. Public Work is built on that kind of care—for others, and for the city that made him. If anything, Cochran wants his images to evoke this notion of fellowship.  “I hope that the idea of being fucking nice to each other lingers.”

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OLAMIDE OYENUSI: How are you doing today?

JOSEPH COCHRAN: Not bad. Can’t complain.

OYENUSI: What did you do this morning?

COCHRAN: This morning I did what I do every day. I woke up, read the news, had a coffee.

OYENUSI: What news? What’s your go-to?

COCHRAN: I find The Guardian is unbiased enough, read The Intercept and a couple of newer ones. And Jacobin, as per usual. I read that pretty often.

OYENUSI: And now that the images are installed, does it feel different seeing them in a public space?

COCHRAN: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, a lot of photographs and work that I make, I make in situ, in the streets and people’s homes, stuff like that. And the centerpiece right here, this is one of the ones that I was just bopping along on Fifth Avenue and I saw this whole private school, high-wealth graduation happening. And like most things that attract my curiosity, I’m like, “I’m going to go check it out.” I go in there, and I’m seeing what some would consider to be a more WASP, white ceremonial thing going on, the different displays of wealth, how much more subtle it is than the equivalent from where I come from or the things that I’m into. When I see it up like this I’m like, “Oh, it looks as I intended it to be.”

OYENUSI: Do you know if it was a high school graduation? College?

COCHRAN: I believe it was actually middle school.

OYENUSI: Oh, wow.

COCHRAN: It was at St. Peter’s Cathedral. So I’m like, “What kind of patronage is making something like this happen?”

OYENUSI: Did you talk to any of the people involved?

COCHRAN: Sometimes I just try and let scenes unfold rather than intervene in any of it.

OYENUSI: Other than that one, you mentioned a few other favorites like East River, Prayer, FDA, Ripley. What drew you to these images in particular?

COCHRAN: So East River, which is one of a number of dark ones in this [show], this was taken at a time when I was working an electoral campaign, and I was doing this mostly remote. For Chi Ossé, District 36. So back in 2021, when he got elected, I was working mostly remote, and I would ride around with a friend of mine who was working for a weed delivery service. For seven, eight hours a day, I’m typing away on policy and shit like that while sitting in a car just smoking blunts with this kid, dropping shit off in the middle of the pandemic. And this is one of the ones that, while it’s not the block that I grew up on or even the building I grew up in, it’s a neighborhood very close to where I spent my early years.

These projects are called the East River Projects. So what you see, this obscuration, is trees as we’re passing by. And then obviously you have the lights and everything that look more spectral, ghostly. And I really like that. I think it’s indicative of the kind of spaces that I frequented, but also moody, a good mood. That one really speaks to me.

OYENUSI: You titled the show Public Work. What does that mean to you—not just as a title, but as a framework for art?

COCHRAN: I think that photography, at least in the realm that I do it, is a social practice. It’s dependent on public trust and me getting people’s trust. And I think that I’ve been able to demonstrate over these 13 years that I’ve been making work that I have an ability to be personable enough and empathetic enough to people to have them open themselves to me. Public space—how we interact in public space, how we negotiate that space as individuals and as a collective—this is what community is built out of. This is what families are built out of. It’s built out of these public interactions. And especially since I’ve been back in the US, I have seen a considerable decline in, let’s say respect for the idea of public space. So the title is a reminder for myself, but also for the audience, that in the city, you might have city workers, you might have construction workers, you might have bus drivers or whatever, but we as people are also committed to public work, and we are also public workers in making this whole city move.

OYENUSI: And how do you build that trust?

COCHRAN: I think as we always have, which is taking the risk of trusting people until you can’t trust them. You know what I mean? I’ve documented the worst of people and the best of people. But all of it started from me building some sort of rapport with them first, and being able to look beyond their faults for the sake of the story or the sake of the context.

OYENUSI: Do you think that people see themselves in the way that your images reflect them? Is that your hope?

COCHRAN: 50/50.

OYENUSI: 50/50?

COCHRAN: Yeah. Let’s take one of the other images, like Ripley. I mean, some would call it an indie sleaze-esque image or whatever. But this is the first time I met this person and we were in a communal space of public trust. I’m like, “Oh, let me get a picture of you.” And they just immediately showed me their chest. And especially for myself, as a somewhat larger Black male, I come into these spaces and people aren’t really that forthcoming. But this shows me that someone feels safe and comfortable around me, no matter how explicit or raunchy it is. You know what I mean? It’s not something like, “Oh, I do this all the time.” It’s like, “No, I’ll do this for you, for the sake of this image.”

OYENUSI: You’ve talked a little bit about what care looks like in your work towards others. What about towards yourself?

COCHRAN: It’s a good question. I’ve always felt that since this practice fell into my lap, I owed it to myself to just do it. And I’ve tried to quit many times.

OYENUSI: What would you do instead?

COCHRAN: I had a period of time, like when I lived in China, when I was telling my ex-wife like, “Oh, none this shit is working. Maybe I should just fucking teach and chill out. Life is already good.” Then, months or maybe years in, I just wake up one day and I can’t emotionally continue whatever it is I’m doing because the practice keeps me centered. When I didn’t have anything, it was the thing that kept me going every day. So to answer your question, caring for myself is being resolute in the things that I want to do

OYENUSI: You mentioned China. What other places did you go abroad?

COCHRAN: I spent nearly five years in China. Then I lived in Morocco for some time. Then I lived in southern Italy for two, almost three years. Then I moved to Brussels, Belgium, where I lived for almost two years.

OYENUSI: Do you have a favorite place?

COCHRAN: Oh, man. I definitely really, really, really love Shanghai. It’s just like Blade Runner. It’s the future. But seeing the Safi region of Morocco, but specifically Essaouira, also known as Mogador, which is where Jimi Hendrix wrote Castles Made of Sand—as a kid from the hood, I was like, “Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m here seeing this.” Malta was definitely interesting too. And another one of the more interesting [places] was Harare, Zimbabwe.

OYENUSI: And how did being abroad change the way that you see New York?

COCHRAN: Well, I had never gotten on a plane before I moved to China. I had never left the Tri-State area. Three weeks in, I had this severe mental breakdown there. I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know anything past ’89, like Tiananmen Square. I’m fresh out the hood like, “What the fuck is going on?” So that was one of the contributing factors. But the main factor was, for the first time in my life, I had time.

OYENUSI: What does that mean, exactly?

COCHRAN: It means that, prior to leaving America, I was in my early 20s working 60, 70-hour work weeks, breaking my back with no direction. Photography wasn’t something I started doing until I was 22. I was just hustling, working the day job. I was raised to believe that the only thing that one should do is try to secure their financial future by any means necessary. And going to China, being in a place where you can pay rent every month or every three months, whatever you want, it warped my thoughts about money, about status.

OYENUSI: What about race?

COCHRAN: Well, race definitely played a contributing factor. But at the same time, leaving showed me how much more tethered to this country I am. You know what I mean? I come from a pretty heavy Islamic, anti-American kind of family. The war on drugs got to them, mass incarceration got to them, shit like that. Me and my father, for example, we have parallel experiences. The only difference is, his world became more insular through incarceration, drug use, crime, things like that, whereas mine opened up. When I got abroad, you run into xenophobic shit, you run into racist shit. But at the same time, it isn’t any different than what I ran into here, no matter where I’ve been. And overall, I found people to be more curious about me than they were projecting their ideas are about race and class onto me.

OYENUSI: Now that you’re back in New York, what does public space mean to you in rapidly gentrifying city?

COCHRAN: Well, gentrification is cyclical. It’s always happening. I have seen at least two cycles of gentrification in the city. There’s the gentrification that came in the post-2008 subprime mortgage fallout, the Bloombergian recession, that caused an era of gentrification that made me leave the city for a little bit, even. And I’ve witnessed the gentrification that’s happening now.

If I’m used to paying 3K in Harlem and I move to Yonkers, I’m a gentrifier, even though I’m from here. You know what I mean? Gentrification just means raising the value of a community. So in that essence, I would call it more a chaotic neutral than a good or bad. That being said, both of these things are causing mass consolidation of third spaces, also known as public spaces. We just saw the Elizabeth Street Garden go through an insane fight for public space. You go back to 2011, you have Occupy [Wall Street] at Zuccotti Park. Like, “Oh, surprise. This is not even a public park. It’s actually privately owned.” You have spaces that are supposed to be for the public just being purchased. And I believe that there are significant swaths of city life that should not be owned by anyone but the people. You know what I mean? Like the metro, like parks, even interior social spaces, community centers and things like that. These should all be subsidized by the government fully, which a lot of them are. But again, with the economic philosophies we have now, people are buying up these spaces and it’s making us more alienated and destabilizing the trust that we have in one another.

There was a time when I was in my late teens and early 20s and I could go outside and not spend a dime. Now, in those same spaces, there’s a cost for entry. There’s corporate raves going on, there’s all these things that are supposed to be holistic and for the people, but there’s a barrier to entry. I think that a New York that loses its public offerings will cease to be New York. New York has always been primarily a blue-collar city that has pockets of wealth, and it should stay that way.

OYENUSI: Your work gets compared to Frederick Wiseman and Jacob Riis a lot. Do you relate to that lineage? Do you resist it?

COCHRAN: Well, that’s a compliment.

OYENUSI: I was even thinking about Foucault.

COCHRAN: I love Foucault. See? You fucking get it. I mean, Wiseman, through David Simon, the creator of The Wire, opened the floodgates for me to begin to assess what individual authorship of social practice means in the image context. Because you look at The Wire, which is drama, but it’s shot like it’s a Frederick Wiseman documentary—very still shots, some hand-held work. Nothing’s perfect, but everything fits. And what you see even in The Wire is this conversation about bureaucracy at all levels. The drug dealers have a bureaucracy. The fucking police have a bureaucracy. The longshoremen have a bureaucracy. It’s all connected. Something that Wiseman also showed me through his work, through his over 90-something documentaries, is the same adage: that everything is connected. And looking at someone like Wiseman led me to artists like Hans Haacke, who literally had an exhibition called All Connected, where he looked at all the social strata, the nebula of social life, and used elements of it to hammer home what was then the burgeoning of neoliberalism, which can now be seen completely engulfing every aspect of public life.

OYENUSI: When the show comes down, what do you hope lingers with the audience?

COCHRAN: I hope that the idea of being fucking nice to each other lingers.