Charlie Engman: Mom
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Featuring a luxurious cloth cover and texts by Rachel Cusk and Miranda July, MOM is Charlie Engman's homage to his mother's many selves
Brooklyn-based photographer Charlie Engman (born 1987) has been shooting portraits of his mother Kathleen McCain Engman since 2009. Collected into a single monograph for the first time, Engman's striking series portrays the artist's mother in a variety of surreal scenes, sometimes nude and at other times dressed in a furry red jumpsuit, in the photographer's studio or in a field on the side of a road.
Engman's work depicts an intense collaboration between photographer and subject that challenges the conventions of portraiture. In addition to Engman's photography, this publication also includes an essay by novelist Rachel Cusk and a conversation between Kathleen McCain Engman and writer-filmmaker-artist Miranda July, who writes: "I look at Charlie and Kathleen and realize I could dream a little bigger. A little weirder. But how does one raise a child so confident that he can create a world of groundbreaking possibility with his own mother"
Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk read English at New College, Oxford. Her first novel Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She reviews regularly for The Times and TLS.
Miranda July
Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and artist. Her debut novel, The First Bad Man, was an instant New York Times bestseller, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. Her novel All Fours was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, the Women’s Prize, and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. In 2025, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. July lives in Los Angeles.
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