The ‘artist’s mother’ is one of the oldest subjects in the history of art. To capture one’s mother is a tender and sensitive act. It can be curious, cautious, loving, particularly flattering or unflinchingly honest. The proximity and intimacy to a mother as model is unique to all others, and to pose for your child is an act of maternal love.
Countless great artists have made portraits of their mothers, immortalising them in film, paint and words across the centuries. Andy Warhol’s stippled and swirling Pop Art impressions of his mother Julia remain a highlight of his oeuvre. David Hockney made an iconic mosaic of photographs, shifting and arranging pictures together in the simply titled piece ‘ My Mother’. And one of Pablo Picasso’s most expressive portrayals is of his mum in pastel profile. “I want my parents to live forever,” said the late, great American photographer Larry Sultan, and indeed he spent his life photographing his parents, ensuring that, in some ways, they did.
Charlie Engman has been photographing and filming his mother, Kathleen McCain, for a decade, in what began as a very casual, organic process of documenting her in their everyday life. Over time, that morphed into getting her to try on designer clothes after fashion shoots, and then further into her getting dolled up and taking on characters in front of his lens. As his photography career took off, Engman began shooting for the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Vogue and Stella McCartney, but his muse always remained his mother, and after time she slipped into his commissioned work too.
Here, Engman tells Refinery29 the story of how his collaboration with his mum unfolded and shares a few of his favourite pictures of her.
“I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a diverse and liberal suburb of Chicago,” Engman remembers. “It was a good mix of opportunities, with one foot in the city and one foot in the backyard. I feel grateful to have grown up there, especially as a queer kid. Tolerance is dogma there, and if I suffered from anything, it was from too much uncritical permission.”
Engman’s earliest encounters with photography came when working in theatre and dance and needing to record movements and gestures. The camera was primarily a “note-taking device” for him in those days, and after graduating from the University of Oxford, he returned home where this form of picture-taking continued.
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
“My first memory of intentionally photographing my mother was right after I graduated university, and was briefly living on my parents’ couch back in Evanston,” he says. “My interest in photography was very fresh and new, and I was making pictures of anything and everything around me, which included her.”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
Over time, Engman focused in on his mother and fell into a groove of repeatedly taking her portrait. Of his mother and her reaction to this, Engman says, “she is ruthlessly selfless and extremely permissive, so I think at first she considered participating as just one of her many motherly duties. I think she finds this kind of participation extremely rewarding, though, and our dynamic is constantly growing and deepening as we keep going.”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
When asked whether photographing Kathleen feels like a particularly emotive act, Engman says, “I actually think photography is in many ways a very anti-emotive act; you can’t have a window without a wall. Photographs are inherently non-immersive and enable a level of scrutiny and specificity that is not available to lived experience. There’s a lot of scope for fakery, too.” The experience of looking back at the images he takes of her, and making more of them, is often about “filling in that gap between the fantasy and the lived reality,” he says.
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
Engman and Kathleen take long, mother-and-son road trips for pictures sometimes – the direction and the duration of them always different, and often spontaneous. In many of his pictures, she is seen stalking through small towns, posing in front of rocky landscapes and running across open fields. “I love a cliché,” he muses, “so we’ve done The American Road Trip a few times. It’s less about finding spaces and more about experiencing things together.”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
There’s something incredibly performative and playful about the pictures the two of them make. “She’s a ham (and I am, too), so performance and play is unavoidable, even when the work is candid and un-staged,” he says fondly. And who picks the outfits and the settings? “That’s mostly me,” he says, “but our collaboration is very loose and wide-ranging, as are our discussions about it.”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
After years of making pictures of Kathleen for his personal work, he slowly began to filter her into the commissions he was taking on. The very first time this came about, Engman was asked by his good friend and fellow photographer Marton Perlaki, to shoot a fashion editorial for a Budapest-based magazine called The Room, and he decided to use Kathleen as his model. “This was early in my editorial career, and I was still trying to navigate the murky ethics and politics of fashion photography,” he says. “ The Room felt like a safe space to start washing some of those weird feelings out of my hair and my work. I was also curious about bringing the collaborative and world-building aspects of fashion editorial into something that was more personal and mundane.”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.Engman has since photographed Kathleen for campaigns and editorials, and shot her for music videos too. When asked to share a favourite example he shows us the music video he made for the song “Polly” by Gem Club, and picks a particular still to focus on. “This was the first time I filmed her, and the experience opened up a lot of new things,” he remembers. “On an intellectual/academic level, I think this image says a lot about what the acts of looking, image-making, and sharing are doing. On an emotional level, it makes me proud and embarrassed at the same time, which is very much my experience of her.”
In another picture Engman shares, we see Kathleen’s face warped and cartoon-like, her features made freakish and ethereal inside a goldfish bag filled with water. “I modelled this one after a bit from a Japanese prank show,” he says. “Putting her head into that felt like a compelling mix of conceptualism and stupidity. It also shows her incredible dedication and work ethic. There are about 8 people outside of the frame making it work, too!”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.
It’s been almost a decade since Engman began photographing his mother. He acknowledges that their relationship has changed and developed over the years, as has the way Kathleen sees herself, but working out what impact the camera has had on those things directly would be difficult to quantify. “The changes caused by the project and the changes caused by a decade of life are all mixed together, so the answer is absolutely yes, but I’m too implicated to know what those changes are.”
The last image he shares with us sees Kathleen, formidable and defiant, staring straight into the lens, a grey suit jacket around her shoulders, painted desert dunes in the background and bathed in golden afternoon light. This is the picture, he says, that Kathleen says looks closest to “how she sees herself.”
Mom Series. Photo Courtey of Charlie Engman.Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
Sia Uses Her Real Face On Dating Apps & No One Knows Who She Is