Conceptual nominee

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to the use of Nature against queer people in most legal systems across the planet. We are deemed unnatural and made criminals through inequitable semantics. The 8x10 negative becomes a portrait, a darkroom contact print that is gifted to each of The Wild Beasts, an intimate artifact of my gratitude. At these borders I lash at the histories of oppression, remaking these lineages and tools into spaces for empathy, tenderness, and love.

Peter Cochrane uses ever-changing scientific classifications of plants and biology to examine human relationships through photographic self-portraiture, abstraction, floral arrangements, and installation. He explores the fabrication of histories, the systemic categorization of people through political systems, and the effects of trauma and recovery.

His work has appeared in BOMB, Headmaster, The San Francisco Chronicle, make/shift, SFAQ/NYAQ/AQ, Artslant, the de Young Museum, the Vermont Center for Photography, the Tokyo International Photo Awards, and others. He has created books that have traveled to the Vancouver Art/Book Fair, the Los Angeles Art Book Fair, the San Francisco Art Book Fair, and the Room&Book Fair at the ICA in London. He has held solo exhibitions in San Francisco, California and Richmond, Virginia. His work is in the permanent collections of [sentanyl] and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.