Charlie Engman started photographing his mother, Kathleen McCain Engman, in 2009. He was visiting his parents during a break from college. “I was taking pictures of anything and everything around me and, naturally, that included my parents,” he told me over the phone. When he developed the film from the trip, he noticed something in the photographs of his mother: “Sometimes people transform for the camera,” he said. “I couldn’t recognize the person in the picture.”
In 2012, the Hungarian magazine The Room commissioned Engman to photograph a fashion spread, and he decided to use Kathleen as his model. “That was the first time I sat down and studied my mother,” he said. “My real mother and the mother in my photographs—there is very little resemblance, but we’re really pushing the boundaries of the relationship. There’s a funny give-and-take: in many ways, I treat her as a material that I can manipulate and play with, but she also has her own ideas and brings a lot to the process. We kind of know what each other is comfortable with, and what we are trying to achieve together and separately.” Engman has continued to use his mother as a muse, both for commissioned shoots and in his personal work.
Kathleen, who worked in the Peace Corps in Guatemala before Engman was born, was visiting his apartment, in Brooklyn, when I called. Of her experience on the other side of the camera, she said, “Some of my girlfriends take one look at this work, and say, ‘Why does he see you like that?’ I don’t think he’s seeing me. I don’t think he’s telling a story about his mom. Even someone you think you see, like your mother, is actually material for looking at the world in a new way.”
[#image: /photos/59096aaaebe912338a3762c6] See more Mother’s Day posts from The New Yorker.
