MOM

MOM is an intense collaboration between photographer Charlie Engman and his mother, Kathleen McCain Engman, who has been posing for her son since 2009. Containing a decade’s worth of portraits—and rich with fashion, art, and photo-history references—MOM possesses what Chuang calls “a strange magnetism and delirious complexity.” Through an exhaustive array of personas and performative situations, Engman and his mother experiment with discomfort, artifice, vulnerability, and familiarity. “Engman’s project has shades of the conceptual masquerade of Cindy Sherman, the outrageousness of Juergen Teller, and the critique of Boris Mikhailov,” Chuang says. MOM tests boundaries in a rigorous display of creative control, collaboration, and deep trust.