Best known for his landscape photos as well as his photos of Americana and alt-country acts, local photographer Chad Cochran was obsessed with heavy metal music when he was a teenager. Cochran, who grew up in Fredericktown, OH, a city of about 1,800 at the time he lived there, plastered his bedroom walls in metal posters in such an extreme way, he now wonders what his parents thought.
“You couldn’t even see the drywall in my room — the walls were completely covered by metal posters,” he says one morning from Propaganda, a Lakewood coffeehouse near his Bay Village home. The Portrait Sessions, an exhibit of Cochran’s portrait photos (many of which are musicians), opens on Feb. 13 at BayArts. The exhibit runs through April 4. “I grew up at that perfect time when we went from not really knowing what musicians looked like unless you went to a show or had the album cover or subscribed to music magazines like RIP and Circus and Metal Edge. Once MTV hit, it completely changed. I was drawn to the visuals. Thematically, it has been darker. I can’t imagine what it was like being a parent and seeing my bedroom walls without having some level of concern in seeing Ozzy and Danzig.”
Initially, Cochran started taking concert photos with a Blackberry.
“A memory just came up on Facebook, and it was all these photos I had taken at Bonaroo with a Blackberry,” he says. “I have pictures of the White Stripes, and they are all fuzzy. When I started going to concerts, I would take pictures of the crowd in addition to the people on stage.”
After he received a camera when he was 40, he began to take photography more seriously and explored rural landscapes.
“It was old farmhouses and signs and barns,” he says. “I was living in Columbus, OH. I would go out and drive and listen to music. I remember I started posting photos on Facebook, and someone wanted to buy one. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t even know how to make a print.”
In 2012, he did a photo exhibit at a wine bar in Mount Vernon, OH and continued to shoot landscapes. He took landscape photos for about five years before he started shooting portraits. Ohio singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless sent him down the portrait path.
“She was the very first person who asked me to do her portrait,” Cochran says of Loveless. “I immediately said no. I was not a portrait photographer. It was not what I wanted to do. She famously replied, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I said, ‘Okay, but I can’t promise you anything.’ Those photos were not great.”
But during those portrait sessions with artists like Loveless, Cochran noticed thematically that many musicians talked about mental health in a way that paralleled with addiction and childhood trauma.
“At the time, my father was a prescription drug addict,” says Cochran. “He was dealing with some of that, and I wanted to take something negative and turn it into something positive.”
At that point, he started a portrait series devoted to mental health.
“The initial concept was something about having a secret,” he says. “My music friends said it was a great idea, but they wouldn’t do. I eventually called it I Didn’t Want To Tell You. The question is how mental health has played a role in your life. Some people chose to talk about themselves or a relative or a friend.”
No Depression magazine was putting out a wellness issue that almost lined up perfectly with Cochran’s series. He went to six people he had done portraits for to see if they would participate, and they said yes. No Depression published those photos in 2018.
The upcoming exhibit at BayArts will feature a retrospective of early photos.
“It’ll feature portraits that I did in my studio and backstage and in collaboration with music festivals,” he says. “There are also some on-the-fly portraits. I just happened to be standing there and took a portrait photo.”
The portraits in the show will be for sale as well.
“For me, I’m long past the desire to be published,” says Cochran. “At one point, I thought it would look nice on a resume. I don’t know that it means much anymore. For me, the fact that we are in that age when everyone could be a photographer removes the boundaries. I like doing what people would consider normal portraits. I enjoy pushing the boundaries with filters and strange things. I will grab a piece of plastic and shoot through that. I like doing things like that, as long as it’s something that someone else likes.”
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter