‘The artist Charlie Engman is one of the few photographers who have leaned into the alien logic of the new machine age and found a way to make something that feels new. Previously known for his theatrical, provocative photographs of his mother, Engman has in the past year turned his attention to producing work with the A.I. image-generation software Midjourney. To my surprise, when I reached out to Engman recently, at his Brooklyn studio, he described himself as a “technophobe.” A native of the Chicago suburbs, he studied Japanese and Korean at Oxford University and became interested in photography after stumbling on a book by the Japanese artist Rinko Kawauchi, who makes lyrical pictures of nature and domestic life. In a sense, his foray into A.I. started with a similar process of accidental discovery. On the recommendation of a friend, he started toying around with Midjourney. “For the first while, it was just novel to me—Wow, you can make these funny pictures. But it wasn’t good,” he recalled. “And then, one time, I randomly did make something that I was, like, This is maybe cooler than anything I’ve ever made. How did that happen?”’ – The New Yorker Magazine

https://www.charlieengman.com/