Charlie Engman

Biography
Based in Brooklyn, Charlie Engman is an American artist, photographer, educator, and art director for the sustainable fashion brand Collina Strada. His multidisciplinary practice examines the social and emotional dimensions of imagery and hyper-visibility in contemporary culture, with a focus on the body as a site of mediation between self and otherness. Engman’s recent work incorporates generative AI, positioning him at the forefront of exploring how technology shapes and transforms the visual and emotional dynamics of contemporary life. His use of AI interrogates how disembodied technologies mediate representations of the body, visual identity, and cultural production, offering critical insights into the evolving relationships between labor, capital, and creativity.

Residency project
Nestlé – 2026
During his residency at La Becque in September 2026, as part of Images Vevey, Charlie Engman develops Poster Child, a project in which he revisits his photographic archive using artificial intelligence to compose strange domestic scenes. Continuing his exploration of the family photograph, Engman examines the family circle as a structure through which society imagines and reproduces its future. For Poster Child, he transforms his apartment at La Becque into both a creative laboratory and a curious family home, blurring the boundaries between photography, artificial imagery, and domestic space. The title draws on the English expression “poster child,” referring to an archetypal figure whose image comes to embody a particular idea or cause.

Hosted in the spaces of La Becque, Charlie Engman’s residency is initiated by Images Vevey and made possible with the support of Nestlé.

Residency report
ECAL — 2025
During my 2025 ECAL residency, I developed a new body of research focused on the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of generative AI imagery. This work was conducted in conjunction with the University of Art and Design Lausanne and its Soft Photography research program, which investigates the role of emotion, sensitivity, and affect in contemporary photographic practices. Building on my ongoing interest in the body, visibility, and image circulation, I used the residency as a period of slowed production and close looking—approaching AI not as a tool for efficiency, but as a site of ambiguity, projection, and emotional charge. Rather than aiming for resolved images, I treated the process as visual research: generating, editing, and collecting material in order to observe recurring gestures, failures, and affective patterns within algorithmic outputs. The project examined how disembodied technologies produce representations of the body that feel intimate, persuasive, or unsettling, and how these images echo the logics of fashion, advertisement, and platform culture. Alongside studio experimentation, I used the residency to write and reflect on a theoretical framework connecting AI-generated imagery to broader questions of labor, taste, and visibility. — Charlie Engman