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News — 2024
The Magician Longs to See — Solo Exhibition
Context 2024 — Filter Photo
The Magician Longs to See
Solo Exhibition
The Athenaeum, La Jolla, CA
January 19 - April 13, 2024
In The Magician Longs to See, Peter Cochrane presents an alchemical tale about the natural world and humanity, using stories of life, death, and the human desire to preserve. Cochrane draws inspiration from indigenous plants in his home state of California and from the Athenaeum’s own botanical archives. Darkroom prints and abstractions of roses, pine cones, and other local plantings recreate traces of life that once lived in and around the library, including the Torrey pine that stood as a sentinel for the building’s entrance, and climbing roses proposed by Kate Sessions for a 1921 garden renovation. Cochrane’s interest in horticultural and photographic histories also considers the optical manifestation of the alchemical pursuit—the transformation of lead into gold—through which, working with analog photographic processes, metals, and translations, the artist explores the materiality of elements across humanity’s attempts at preservation.
—Christie Mitchell, Executive Director; and Jocelyn Saucedo Larson, Manager of Administration and Exhibitions
Context 2024
Filter Photo, Chicago, IL
Juried by Sarah Kennel
March 22 - April 27, 2024
Filter Photo is pleased to announce Context 2024, our tenth annual survey exhibition of contemporary photography. This year's exhibition was juried by Sarah Kennel—the Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts—and features the work of 23 artists.
"We are inundated on the daily with an ocean of images, yet the clarity, finesse, and power of the photographs in Context 2024 speak to a collective desire for making work that means something, that can cut across the blaring noise. Across portraiture, documentary, landscape
and experimental work, the artists in this exhibition show us that in these troubled and troubling times, photography retains the capacity to reveal, to connect, to delight, and to bear witness, even as the medium continues to evolve and shape-shift.”
—Sarah Kennel
The Hopper Prize — Interview
I am pleased to have an interview published on The Hopper Prize website. Here I discuss recent bodies of work and how they have evolved into new ones, including my upcoming visual narrative of the history of botanical life.
From the interview:
What inspired you to get started on this body of work?
My interest in botany started somewhere in my teenage years. The Wild Beasts is full of codes that point to specific biological and social implications of plants, which I use to add dimension to the personality of the subject. The more I worked to insert little secrets through my choice of flowers, the more I realized I wanted to share botanical history in a more explicit way. I like to think of photographs as movies—they’re still images, but what’s happening inside and outside of the frame? What led up to the creation of an image, and what will come after? What is the lore behind each component part that makes up the totality of the picture?
I was a part of the Museum of Contemporary Photography auction Darkroom this year, and was pleased to have sold a piece called Magnolia grandiflora from my upcoming body of work creating a visual narrative of the history of botanical life. It’s always wonderful to help with MoCP’s fundraising.
I also participated in and sold two artworks through the Washington Project for the Arts’s Collectors’ Night in Washington, D.C. The half size of For Théo and the full size of For Taylor from The Wild Beasts both found homes, and I was happy to have helped such a great organization.
Peter Cochrane — Updates — Fall, 2022
Award + Exhibitions + Book
This year started with my nomination for The Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography and moved on with the inclusion of two images, For Michael and For Michael_ from The Wild Beasts in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s exhibition, Beyond the Frame (still on view through Sunday, October 30th!); an upcoming exhibition at Candela Gallery (opening Friday, November 4th); and the release of my first book—a handmade risograph book of the first images for my newest body of work, The Sensual World.
Nominated for The Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography, 2022
Earlier this year I was nominated for The Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. You can only apply to the award if you have been nominated, so it was an enormous honor to present my work to the esteemed jury of international arts professionals. Past recipients and honorable mentions include: Lisa Oppenheim, Alec Soth, Richard Moss, and most recently Sara Cwynar for the 2020 award.
More information about the prize from the host institution, The Israel Museum:
“In 2010 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem proudly announced the creation of the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. This new prize was created by the Shpilman family and the Shpilman Institute for Photography together with the Israel Museum, in recognition of photography as a leading contemporary cultural medium, and with the joint objective of cultivating original work in the field of photography.
The prize, in the amount of $ 40,000, is awarded once every two years based on the review and decision of an international jury composed of five leading professionals.
One of the most generous prizes in the field of art photography worldwide, the Shpilman Prize aims to support contemporary photographic projects relating to questions of the current human condition and the world of art within it.”
Museum of Contemporary Photography
Beyond the Frame
Chicago, IL
Closes October 30th!
The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL owns two images from The Wild Beasts—a portrait of Michael and its accompanying landscape. Titled For Michael and For Michael_, both are on view as part of the museum’s current exhibition, Beyond the Frame. Huge thanks to Kristin Taylor, Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, for including me in this project!
From the museum:
“Our interactions with images help shape our experience of the world. From storytelling to journalism, expressions of selfhood to shedding light on social issues, photographs have infinite capacities to engage, communicate, and convey. Yet the way we see an image reflects our individual perceptions and histories. Although photographs are often considered documents of real moments in time, we should look carefully, considering not only the choices made by the photographer but also how those choices influence our interpretations. With billions of images produced and shared each day, discerning how we read pictures has become vitally important—especially with representations of historical events, notions of identity, and shared human experiences all in play.
Beyond the Frame spotlights the MoCP’s permanent collection of more than 16,500 works as a rich resource for harnessing visual literacy skills. Each gallery features works focused on critical topics that appear over and over again in the history of the medium, such as Portraiture and the Human Subject, Landscape and Place, and Staged and Constructed Images. By placing works by historical and contemporary, local and international artists together according to distinct themes, we invite you to look with awareness, and when you re-enter the image-saturated world beyond the museum’s walls, to pursue thoughtful, questioning engagement with the visual depictions you encounter. There is always more to the story beyond the frame.”
Candela Gallery
Blue Hour
Richmond, VA
Friday, November 4 - December 21, 2022
I will be debuting four images from my newest body of work, The Sensual World, at Candela Gallery in Richmond, VA.
From Candela:
“Candela Gallery is pleased to announce Blue Hour, a group exhibition featuring photographic works by Granville Carroll, Peter Cochrane, Heather Evans Smith, Dylan Hausthor, Galina Kurlat, Raymond Thompson Jr, and Em White.
Blue Hour is the sliver of time between the setting of the sun and the creep of darkness, when everything is wrapped in a gauze of periwinkles and powder blues. As autumn sheds its colors in favor of the barren outfits of winter, Blue Hour seems ever-present. The natural world begins to rest in preparation for hard work in the spring. A modern way of human life fights against the body’s primal desire to join the others who sleep. Do we keep moving towards light, joy, and the comforts of human interaction, or do we succumb to a natural pull?
Em White’s glittering tintypes and Peter Cochrane’s mystic winter landscapes remind us of an eternal attachment to natural cycles; the alternative process works of Raymond Thompson Jr and Galina Kurlat, and the beautiful, domestic isolation of Heather Evans Smith’s Blue series speak to impending loneliness and self reflection; there is both fear and reverence for the night in the flashbulb forest subjects of Dylan Hausthor, and enchantment by the mysteries of the future with Granville Carroll’s celestial compositions.”
The Sensual World
Risograph Book
Available for purchase!
I am so pleased to offer for purchase my first book, The Sensual World. The risograph prints in a similar method to a screen printer; one color image is created by passing the same page through the machine four times to layer individual colors. Each 8x10” risograph image plays a kind of trick on our eyes, as these tiny dots placed next to each other create the illusion of a cohesive picture. A plant, a tree, a river, a rock—all are rendered through four simple colors sitting closely to one another. I needed to get in between those dots to find the missing information in my recovery. Once I had the printed images in hand, I photographed them with a digital camera and blew them up to a very large scale. Printed huge, these landscapes quiver like the dot matrix of an old television screen. They are both whole and disintegrating. Beautiful and terrible. Nature itself.
The Sensual World, by Peter Cochrane
Self-published, printed by Clown Kisses Press
16 pages with archival tissue paper interleaving
8.5”x11”
Limited edition, also available with 10x15” archival pigment print
Order both the book or the book with a print here.