Charlie Engman

September 14, 2021

Charlie Engman

Charlie Engman is an artist and photographer who got in to the industry while doing performance practice and a bachelors degree in Japanese and Korean studies at the university of Cambridge. He has featured in a wide range of venues a few being FOAM Museum, Manchester Gallery and Lishui international photography festival. He has also been in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Dazed&Confused also American Vogue and Italian Vogue.

As well as his own personal projects, Engman has been involved in a lot of commercial work for many big clients such as Prada, Calvin Klein, Kenzo, Nike, Adidas and Gucci to name just a few. He’s kept within the fashion industry with being a Co-creator of fashion brand Colina Strada.

His most popular book called MOM was recently published in the September of 2020 and is a collection of photographs of his mother Kathleen McCain Engman. Kaleidoscope.Media describe his style as what you get “when you mix the hyper-flatness of late 90s grunge, the colour intensity of post-modern Kodak and the humour and awareness of the internet”.

Engman also includes graphic design and a collage style to some of the images and the layout of them. He also says the post production and layering shows the ‘manipulative nature of photographic images’. Kaleidoscope.media also say “his composition and style also reflect a strong awareness of the context of image creation”.

MOM includes hundreds of images of just his mother Kathleen in various situations and scenarios. Engman started out in commercial work with fashion before he started this book, the idea came from him taking random photos of everything to find what was interesting to him and found himself questioning his mother and all mothers in general. He questioned the stereotypes of how they should behave and how they should look and then he saw how he could transform her as this model or sculpture to look like a non typical mother in his images. Francesca Gavin says there’s a ‘sense of freedom’ in these images.