Like his parents, Joseph attended Loyola Marymount, where he studied film and other subjects. (He never graduated.) It was a course on Asian cinema that changed his life. Viewing the work of unconventional contemporary masters, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films can cut from one narrative to another and another, without foregrounding or explanation, helped release Joseph from Western ideas of how to tell a story. Instead, he began to ask himself what story he could tell from his perspective, and his community’s. Black life and black culture weren’t linear; they had been interrupted too many times by violence, prejudice, disaster, and compromise. And there was the flip side: the juicy originality that emerged from those bad days and funky nights. How best, then, to create on film a black aesthetic that represented the hope, the highs, and the losses of a twenty-first-century New Negro?
To learn more and to share what he was discovering about his medium, Joseph got in touch with other male artists of color, such as the director and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Then, in the mid-aughts, he was hired as an assistant to the black photographer and filmmaker Melodie McDaniel. Working at the Directors Bureau, a commercial and music-video production company in L.A., Joseph learned on the job: he shot behind-the-scenes footage and interviews for Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman had founded the bureau), and filmed B-roll for that artist of disjunction Terrence Malick, while absorbing what McDaniel had to impart: the importance of representing the black world and the female world in ways that were free of ideology.
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