Friday, 7 May 2021
Milan 6pm / London 5pm / NYC 12 noon / Los Angeles 9am / Shanghai 12 midnight
2-hour masterclass
Live on Zoom
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In this masterclass, artist and photographer Charlie Engman will take an idiosyncratic and personal deep-dive into the mechanics and concerns of contemporary portraiture. Drawing on his experiences making portraits of his mother over the course of a decade, which have been collected in the acclaimed book MOM (Edition Patrick Frey, 2020), as well as taking portraits in commercial and editorial contexts including for the New York Times, the New Yorker, US and Italian Vogue, Interview, Dazed, and clients such as Prada, Gucci, Adidas, Nike, Hermès, Calvin Klein, Kenzo, and Vivienne Westwood, Engman will give a subjective survey of various genres of portraiture – from fine art and fashion to vernacular and kitsch – with the aim of provoking and exploring some of the fundamental questions surrounding photographic portraiture today: what is portraiture and how does it work? What are the criteria by which we might nominate a photograph as a portrait and critique its success? How does technology affect portraiture? What relationship does portraiture have to questions of identity and representation? What roles do consent and power play in portraiture? To what ends are portraits used?
Charlie Engman is an artist and photographer currently living in New York City. Engman came to photography while pursuing a performance practice and a bachelor’’s degree in Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of Oxford. His work has been featured in a variety of venues, including the Lisson Gallery; FOAM Museum; Manchester Gallery; OSMOS; Scrap Metal Gallery; and Asama International Photography Festival. His first monograph, MOM, was published by Edition Patrick Frey in 2020.