In his poem An Agony. As Now, Amiri Baraka reflects on life in America:
“I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come into his breath. Love his wretched women.”
Baraka’s words capture an existential fracture—a self-shaped and alienated by a country that despises him. While deeply personal, his agony resonates universally with those marginalized by America’s systems: the Black, the queer, the poor, the displaced, and the differently-abled. His message is clear: America atomizes its people, leaving them depersonalized and derealized.
Though Baraka’s America may seem distant, its remnants persist in New York City. The metropolis of nearly nine million has become a dystopian visage of decay, its unraveling exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Socio-economic divides in healthcare, education, and housing have left nearly a third of its residents in poverty, including one in four children. Homelessness rivals Great Depression levels, while illicit substances flood the streets, exposing the failures of the War on Drugs. The city’s contradictions abound: towering wealth shadows deepening despair.
Inspired by Baraka’s An Agony. As Now, this project began as a meditation on the death of the American metropolis, a testament to a city disconnected from its soul. But as the work evolved, it became something larger—a reflection not only of crisis but of the labor required to document, resist, and survive it.
The city's fractured state was familiar and harrowing for Cochran, who returned to New York months before the COVID-19 lockdowns. It was the culmination of what he had seen brewing a decade earlier. As an African American who comes from abject poverty and displacement, Cochran has lived the lives of many depicted in this series.
Originally conceived under the working title An Agony. As Now, this project has transitioned into Public Work. The title reflects a duality: the city as a public entity in crisis and the labor—emotional, physical, and artistic—required to make visible the lived realities of those most affected. Public Work is not just a chronicle of decay but a call to action. It challenges viewers to see photography as a civic responsibility, a democratic tool to reclaim the soul of a city and reimagine what it could become.
