Joseph Cochran II is a New York City-based photographer, researcher, and educator. Cochran’s practice, which encompasses visual and textual language looks at how images and narratives–particularly those shaped through the archive–mediate social, economic, and political imagination.

Cochran’s traumatic, temporal experiences, a hauntology understood through the racial and geographic circumstances that created them, fuel his desire to not only reconcile his past through the present but to connect to those with analogous experiences. Often taking him to less frequent, usually hermetic communities around the world, his subjects, like himself, have felt the brunt of state-created violence and its systemic reverberations.

These individuals he encounters exist between binaries–life and death, presence and absence, visibility and erasure. Cochran’s approach melds personal and documentary photographic traditions, creating an archive that reflects a true social practice. He sees photography as a civic responsibility, a democratic tool to illuminate the complexities of our shared experience without prejudice.

His works are in the permanent collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York, NY), the Langston Hughes Library (Queens, NY), and the Evergreen State College Library (Olympia, WA).