Hyperreal and high fashion – Inside Charlie Engman's AI photoshoot for Vogue China
For the August 2023 issue of Vogue China, Charlie Engman was asked to photograph Chu Wong for the cover. Engman has shot editorials for magazines including Dazed & Confused, PIN-UP and The Face, and recently has evolved his fine art practice to test the limits of artificial intelligence. As such, the job became something novel: a high-fashion shoot with final images constructed with the use of an AI image-generator.
“Into the wild” was the brief set by then-editor-in-chief Margaret Zhang: a step into the imagined, and out of the ordinary, suggesting a new frontier while still feeling ‘Vogue’. The fundamentals of traditional fashion editorial took place as usual – a real-life model was photographed by Engman on an actual set in London, styled by Vivienne Sun, with traditional, physical clothing pulls, and a hair and makeup team. Physical props were also used, but after the shoot Engman built backdrops using image generation tool Midjourney, and merged them with the help of post-production studio INK.
The result is a synthesis of the real and the hyperreal that won Engman and INK a Yellow Pencil in Photography and Stills Compositing – suggesting the emergence of a new, seductive hybrid.
“Images are images, I firmly believe, and a good image evokes a certain feeling and has a certain interactivity with the real world, even if it's super fantastical.”
Engman stresses the chance for provocation within this space, viewing AI as a tool, like any other, to create images that speak to the human viewing them.
“There's this idea that AI has no constraints: it’s an imagination engine and you can do anything,” Engman says. “But there's a real lack of control that's built into the technology. There's a lot of surprising constraints and limitations built into it. Part of this project was figuring out how to work with those limitations and make them interact with traditional photography in a way that looked interesting and exciting. Images are images, I firmly believe, and a good image evokes a certain feeling and has a certain interactivity with the real world, even if it's super fantastical.”