Charlie White’s OMG BFF LOL

Getting Lindsay Linton, a photo from White’s 2001 body of work, Understanding Joshua.

Charlie White’s work is as consistently terrifying as it is amusing. As a photographer and a filmmaker, he creates worlds of nauseating banality and quotidian artificiality— and then shatters the sense of order with nightmarish bastardizations of the human form, sinister muppets, and hair-raisingly uncomfortable juxtapositions. Even absent of explicitly creepy figures lurking within the frame, White has a keen ability to conjure unease with mere unreadable expressions on the faces of his models.

His latest body of work, called The Girl Studies, focuses on the strangeness of what it means to be a teen girl in America today. The picture below, entitled Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #5 is from a series of portraits that places pubescent girls beside startlingly congruent male-to-female transsexuals. Another series of pictures from The Girl Studies presents pubescent models indifferently replicating poses from tween tabloids like J-14 and Teen Beat, unnerving the viewer by highlighting the sense of uncouth voyeuristic desire that pervades images created by adults for the consumption of young girls.

My favorite part of the The Girl Studies, however, is a series of animated shorts called OMG BFF LOL. Concentrating on a pair of teen girls who love shopping at the mall, OMG BFF LOL is a pastiche of the nauseating consumerist-aspiration crap that monopolizes young girls’ entertainment today, from Bratz to Barbie to Disney Channel cartoons to video games that send girls on shopping sprees. The fact that both teen girl characters are voiced by Charlie White adds another layer of creepy. But aside from all that scariness, OMG BFF LOL is just kind of hilarious. It’s like Daria minus Daria, plus a terrifying, droning sense of capitalist alienation.

Update (1/13/09) I received an e-mail today from Charlie White thanking me for the post and informing me that he did not in fact record the voices for the characters in OMG BFF LOL. “…although there is no overt credit,” writes White, “it is the wonderful work of two very talented actors: Laura Post, and Michelle Ann Dunphy. This little detail is important because these two made OMG BFF LOL come to life.” Sorry for the confusion!

Check out the first installment of OMG BFF LOL, “Mall,” below, and then watch the other two shorts, “Bedroom” and “Bathroom,” along with a thematically related short film White made in 2006 entitled “Pink,” after the jump.



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  • the videos are almost Greg Arakiesque…

    btw thanks a lot for the credit for linking u


  • Wow, his work is awesome.


  • the last two vids are pretty good

    dig the graph paper backgrounds


  • addendum: Shout-out to my friend Andrew for sending me the link to White’s “The Girl Studies” project!