For Artist Charlie Denis, Shooting Photos Is Actually a Lot Like Playing With Barbies

NOMINATED BY NADIA LEE COHEN
31—LOS ANGELES

A photographer who ping-pongs between the commercial and fine art realms, Charlie Denis brings his exuberant style to clients like Levi’s and Skims. His claim to fame is an experimental four-minute Christmas film starring Kim Kardashian that he co-directed with nominator Nadia Lee Cohen in 2024.

“Consistent [in all my photography] is this idea that the photo is not where the story or the emotion ends. I don’t mean this to sound derogatory in any way, but for me, shooting women in particular is kind of like the adult version of playing with Barbie dolls as a queer kid. My favorite part of that would be transforming them—dressing them up and imagining the lives they would live (that maybe a part of me desired too). Then the photos go out into the world and garner attention, which is kind of what I always imagined for the dolls.

[I had an] obsession with realism, then a subsequent realization that realism in these mediums just cannot exist, since the minute you stick a camera in front of anything, it imposes a performance. That’s when I started pushing things further and embracing theatrics. It’s not that I’m totally discarding truth or reality to create something fantastical or surreal; in dressing things up, I’m always very conscious of the inescapable banality of everyday life. So that informs the work too and becomes its own thing that is neither real nor fake, but somewhere in between. It’s much more important to capture a real sense of emotion than trying to capture life exactly as it is. And it’s more fun that way.”