With Charlie Hawks

Come in, Charlie?

Here I am!

Hello, hello - how’s your morning going so far?

It’s going alright thanks :) As good as it can be given the horrific election results in my home country but besides that, it’s sunny out and I’m doing well

It’s a wild dystopian time right now, where is home in the USA? And where are you based now?

Pretty scary that’s for sure. I’m from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It’s a ski town in the mountains. Very beautiful, bears eagles, all that stuff.

I’m now based in Melbourne, been here nearly 5 years and was in NYC for 8 years before that.

What was it like growing up in Jackson Hole? And tell us about your time in NYC….

It was incredible. Such a special upbringing. I was so very lucky to grow up there. I was a diehard skier and grew up just playing in the mountains with my family and friends. Truly idyllic

One sec I’m setting up on my computer so I can type properly. Hard to express myself with just my thumbs.

Good call! It’s ASL chatrooms all over again…

haha literally. I love it. On my laptop now so much more to say.

Okay, fire away, round two…tell us about your time in NYC, and did you find your passion for photography there? Or did it thread back to Wyoming?

New York was everything for me in my late teens and early 20’s. I thought I would spend the rest of my life there to be honest. I attended Bard College north of the city for my photography degree. It was there that I discovered my love of documenting life and was fortunate to make incredibly deep friendships and have the absolute craziest times. After graduating and moving down to the city full time I worked as a photo assistant and that’s where I actually learned about photography as a career and a life. School was phenomenal for learning color darkroom printing, the chemistry of photography, the history, it was a really holistic and in depth program that made me a deep photo nerd, but I had no clue how to actually make a buck shooting photos until I started assisting and learning the hustle.

The forever conundrum as a creative, to learn how to balance commercialising creativity in a way that doesn’t kill your passion…

Yeah for sure, I was living in Brooklyn after school. I was just living the absolute fast life, all the amazing New York cliches that I idolized in the photography of Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow, partying all night, climbing rooftops, biking over the Brooklyn bridge at sunrise, but also somehow working 10 to 16 hour days as a photo assistant on fashion shoots for basically no money and working so hard, but it was just so fun! I had, and still sort of have, a lot of energy I think.

Take us back to that boundless energy of the early 20's.... so, what happened next?

Yes! I spent that time working as an assistant under so many fantastic photographers, mainly in fashion, and spending my free time shooting my own fashion editorials and starting to figure out the type of photography I now shoot, that was all just a combination of learning and hustling and making it up as I went. The best of times, some really hard times, and really important to pushing me where I am today. But having great mentors who were so talented at making images but also being able to learn from them how to interact with clients, how to write an articulate email, how to properly archive your photos! It was where I actually was like ok, this is a straight up job, but the best job ever.

Wyoming came back in later after New York ended. I was going through a bad breakup and went home to Jackson for a few weeks to regroup a bit, or so I thought.

A true coming of age story! How did you find yourself in Melbourne?

Melbourne was by way of going home to Jackson and falling in love with a girl from my hometown who happened to be moving here!

When I moved home, I thought it’d just be for a few weeks, but Jackson has this notorious ability to keep people there. It is Neverland. A paradise of fun. Skiing, biking, hiking, rivers and lakes, mountains to scale. I needed to be home to reconnect with my place and my family and to heal after a very hard and fast city life out in NY. It was really unexpected to spend two years there, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I began dating a girl who I’d always loosely known from home, and she happened to be moving to Melbourne to go to grad school. Eventually, Cora finally invited me to join her, and I ended up moving to Australia the day the borders closed for Covid. Cora and I had never been here, never lived together, been dating for only 5 or 6 months, and were suddenly in Melbourne lockdown together, very far from home.

I have to admit I melted a little bit reading your Cora 5 year appreciation post… How's life for you and Cora here?

Hahaha, I’ve been an oversharer on the internet since the second I got a MySpace. Life online. I think it’s why Instagram has worked well for me, or at least I can justify my addiction to it, sharing my pictures on there.

Here for the oversharing!

Life for us is pretty dang good! We’ve both been insanely busy over the past couple years since getting out of lockdown. Somehow we survived that whole ordeal and emerged so excited and ready to actually experience Melbourne. Since then it’s just been a sort of constant stream of work and network and growth and tirelessly going at it to build a career here.

When not on the grind we’ve been so lucky to build up the best group of friends here to experience the incredible lifestyle together with eating and cooking and dancing and all the fun things. My brother even moved down here almost two years ago and he and Cora are childhood pals so we have a nice little family pod all this way from Wyoming.

It sounds like Melbourne might be home for you guys?

We got our residency last July! It was a lot of work and we are really grateful for it. Wyoming will always be my true home place but especially with the political climate and cost of living and general work/life balance insanity of any city I’d want to live in the States, life is just a lot more livable and enjoyable here.

Ideally we will always be traveling and splitting our time about 9 months in Australia and the rest up north 🙂

Let’s talk about some projects you’ve been working on. You mentioned you had the biggest week career-wise recently. Can you share a bit more about this?

Yes! I recently shot my first global campaign. It was for Bumble, the dating app.

Bumble, wow! That’s amazing, how did it go?

If you told art school fashion snob young me that I’d be shooting flashy wide angle photos of cute couples hanging out that would be on billboards and ads around the world I would probably be a very mixed bag of totally surprised and completely disgusted haha.

Haha, and how about Charlie today - how does he feel about it?

The current Charlie is very psyched on the work. And I’m headed to NYC next week for a friend’s wedding and really hope to see one of the billboards or posters up around the city. It would be really satisfying to see my work on a large scale in the city that made me but in some ways also kind of defeated me.

That surely feels like a huge moment!

Yeah, for sure. The journey to shoot the lifestyle advertising type work I make my living doing was not what I expected but I am so happy doing what I do.

That's nice to hear, and how did the shoot go - what was it like on set?

The shoot went quite well I think. It was my fourth job with Bumble but my first worldwide shoot, so the pressure was on. Three long consecutive shoot days, 7 couples, 14 names to learn, keeping the energy up, it is intense but i enjoy it.

Sounds like a great space to be working in. How did they find your work?

I honestly think they found me when one of their art directors saw my work and put me forward for a shoot a couple years ago, coincidentally it had been passed on by Bryan Derballa, one of my favorite photographers that I assisted years ago in NYC. I would say he was a mentor, and it felt really special to basically inherit a campaign from him (he didn’t shoot it because of weather in the US, so lucky me for nice Australian autumn!)

Can you tell us a little more about some of your other career moments?

Most definitely. By far, one of the most fortunate jobs I’ve had in recent memory was a travel job for the British restaurant chain Wagamama. So random! Again, I think they found my work on Instagram, but I was contracted to travel with their film crew, filming a travel piece of their chefs researching food across Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for a new cookbook. I got to travel with a really fun and talented group of Brits across Asia to three countries I’d never been to, eating like a glutton, learning a lot, shooting some really special work, and making friends as I went.

That culminated in a month-long trip to London after to shoot the actual cookbook in the studio, which was just mind-boggling. I was just astonished and so grateful to be trusted with the project and to be flown across the world to shoot it. And Cora was able to join in for the cookbook portion of the job, helping with art direction and even ended up hand-modeling on the cover! (So many of the hand models couldn’t use chopsticks properly, a crucial skill haha.)

I literally have to go back and look at my website to remind myself. I’m both forgetful and have been really busy, but there are a ton of others! It’s been a crazy couple of years.

Wow, what a dreamy project.....where do you go after a reference point like that?

Is there a particular dream job on the manifestation mood board?

Seriously. It’s true, setting the bar quite high. I’m very spoiled sometimes! But it also takes a 24/7 work ethic, I think, to maintain it, because even with my fantastic agency rep, Hart & Co, behind me (shoutouts Mon, you keep my life intact), the work can disappear at any second, so I stay hungry, stay excited, and stay grateful.

Re: dream job, I have recently been loving shooting hotel jobs. So fun and so many ways to go with it. I just love hotels and traveling, so getting to do some of those has been really great.

However, I have a deep desire to fuse my background as a lover of nature, the mountains, and exploration with my life as a commercial photographer. There is a lot of amazing work happening in the outdoor wear space that I feel hasn’t quite gotten to Australia yet, and that I haven’t felt like I’ve had the time and space to try hard enough at shooting properly, but I really would be excited to shoot more brand work in the outdoor world.

Beyond that, multi-day documentary-type work where I can really embed into a place and build a body of work is the dream. I shot a project for two days in rural Queensland for a land developer that had me really interacting with the local community and depicting it, and it was really deeply gratifying and felt closer to an ‘arts’-based photographic practice like what I learned about people doing in art school—people like William Eggleston or later influences like Justine Kurland.

How about the inspiration board, where do you draw your inspiration from?

I draw inspiration from life. How absolutely corny and lame-sounding that is! But truly, I have had such great fortune to experience a bounty of friendships, an education, and my learning experiences as a young photo assistant getting to travel around the world seeing these rockstar photographers doing their thing. It was just all so alluring to me. I feel like the more I shoot, the more excited I get. Even though I’ve just been blabbing so much about my commercial work, whenever I’m not shooting for work, I’m taking pictures for fun—just running around with Cora, my brother Henry, and our friends, and I cannot help but document it. Beyond that, I will say that seeing the work of other photographers online, in photo books, on Instagram, in the New York Times, wherever, we live in an inundation of images, so it’s impossible not to be constantly absorbed in them.

What advice would you give emerging photographers?

I’m going to sound like the mean old photographers that I worked for, but I guess what they were saying was true! Work your absolute ass off, work for photographers you admire, learn everything about the craft, be a complete nerd, live, eat, breathe for what you do. Keep another hobby, obviously, because our profession is a hobby to so many people, haha, and you don’t want to burn out. But for real, working as an assistant was the entirety of my education, and I think it was so important to learn from and set me up to know how to run my business when it was time to go out on my own. (Enormous shoutouts to Cora because actually I’m so bad at business and she is the backbone, all the bookkeeping, all the things I used to avoid! Would be lost without her). But photography as a profession, you are a sole trader. You are your boss, your assistant, your manager, your IT guy, your courier, your marketing guy—it's all on you. It takes tireless hustle. There are no shortcuts. Be humble but stand up for your work and work hard to show it to people, ask for criticism, absorb criticism, shoot all the time! That’s what I did at least. Who knows. You will get burned a few times. You will have some amazing wins. Eventually, it all starts to make sense. But be organized, be nice to your clients, always be on time, and TRIPLE back up your photos. Not joking. I sound like such a hardass, but I wish somebody had told me all this.

What’s on the horizon for Charlie Hawks?

I have a trip to the States coming up for a mix of work and play. A friend’s wedding and then shooting some work back home before visiting my grandparents in California before coming back to Aus. My grandpa gave me my first film cameras and had a darkroom at home as a child, at 96 he still is writing and painting and we go out on drives and make pictures on our point and shoots together. So I’ll go do that before coming back here for xmas then who knows! I want to take some time to reconnect with my arts practice a bit more. I have been hustling really hard the past few years and want to start to focus on refining the commercial work I do and making the jobs bigger, better, and more. That way I can have free time to shoot things that I’m passionate about and go traveling with Cora around the world, because that’s what we both love to do.

Can you also share some notes on why it feels hard as a young person + creative from the USA at the moment?

Being from the States living as an expat abroad is tough for sure. We are so far from home. With the time change it feels dissociative to be so far from family and friends. But, we made the choice to be here and I stand by it. Especially with the unfortunate reelection of the orange man, I am trying to be optimistic but honestly, it looks pretty grim. I really value my life in Australia, the work life balance is so much healthier. All my friends grinding in NY and LA are so talented. So talented! And so many of them still have shitty little apartments and pay such high rent and it’s so expensive to do anything fun and it’s just a really intense life.

We still spend 2-3 months a year back home between Wyoming and LA mostly and I love it. America has that insane je ne sais quoi haha. It is just electric. It has a vibe and a pulse like nowhere else. I will always have roots there and will always be spending time there but I feel so lucky to split my time.

I hope to hell and back that the country doesn’t completely take a total dark turn with the way things have gone, but I’m prepared for it to be a bit of a trying time. Things can improve though. Even though I’m not living there I will do anything and everything I can to keep the scary nativist, xenophobic, close minded right wing from undoing the country.

All this in saying, it is definitely much easier to be creative in Australia! Which I feel so grateful for. I definitely want to ‘prove’ myself on the big fields in NY and LA, but those jobs will come, I’m feeling confident in that 🙂

Beautifully said, have you got any parting words?

Hmmmm. Not really I wouldn’t say. Just a massive massive thank you to my partner Cora who is my favourite person to photograph/do anything with, all the time. And a huge thank you to my clients, thank you for trusting me to bring your visions to life. Very lucky to call what I do a job, because most of the time I am just still amazed that I get to make photographs for a living. And a last thank you to the team at Hart & Co, specifically my rep Mon who does so much to make my life and jobs easier and have stronger outcomes, you won’t meet a more organised person!

What a lush exit. Thanks so much for your time and your energy today, Charlie. It's been so nice to hear more about you and your world – thank you for being so open and heartfelt <3