CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/9/2021

Definitely our pick for Mothers Day 2021

Featured image is reproduced from MOM, photographer Charlie Engman’s critically-acclaimed photobook collecting 521 ever-more-riveting, hilarious and chameleon-like portraits of Kathleen McCain Engman—his mother and muse—made 2009–2020. In some photos, she is nude, some clothed. In some she has a shaved head, long hair, braids, a wig, makeup, no make-up, ravaged, ravishing—anything and everything seems within limits as she inhabits each mini-persona dreamed up with her son. “I look at Charlie and Kathleen and realize I could dream a little bigger,” Miranda July writes. “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? The image that first pulled me into Charlie’s work was a video of Kathleen against a green screen, coifed and made up, in a tasteful blush outfit, churning her arms with a look of intense determination. She was doing something that made no sense but anyone could see it was important. Anyone could be filled with its meaning.”