HOLLY REVELL PHOTOGRAPHY

I met Charlotte Cooper many years ago through Scottee, when she was a contestant on their show Hamburger Queen, which I was documenting. When I casually suggested we do a shoot to go with her latest book ‘Fat Body Work’; ‘a deeply personal and politically charged journey through fat embodiment and creative resistance’. Following much consideration – nervous about being photographed in a studio, she sent me a compelling email titled ‘Yes to Pics’!

After reading Charlotte’s book, I felt that the ‘power knuckle’ was a strong visual and emotive subject. I was cautious because I didn’t want to put Charlotte into an uncomfortable position or stereotype her, but she was curious and open to experiment. It was a hot day when we took these photographs and the work entailed her getting up and down from the floor multiple times. She felt emboldened by the strangeness and colours of her outfit and by her sweat. She knew this would not be a ladylike picture.

By being able to trust me and work with my direction and vision for the image, as well as my “caring gaze and photographic ethics and integrity”, we created a new way for Charlotte to see herself. She felt exhilarated by this picture, which shows her as being brawny, strong and vulnerable; it shows the work going on in her body as she moves. The picture captured what Charlotte was trying to express in her book.

As a psychotherapist, Charlotte is really interested in creative collaborative processes that release or enable, transcend, allow new things to emerge. She said that my skills in listening and facilitating were essential in the making of this photograph, which Charlotte found healing and empowering. It was an act of solidarity.

This initial shoot, has led to an exciting collaboration, so far involving lots of conversations around what photography is and can be, likewise with psychotherapy, thinking about how we can bring our fields of interest and expertise together? We are talking about: Our Past Experiences. Class. Care, mutual support, solidarity. Collaboration. Documentation. Queering. Ethics, power, consent, vulnerability. Growth, ambition, career, curiosity. Relationship as method, rapport, shared history.

Charlotte tells me, I’m already using therapeutic skills in my practice – Active listening, Creating a working alliance - Trust. We are both very interested in process.

We joke about what we’re NOT doing – Holly holding the camera while Charlotte spills her guts! We’re unsure of what we ARE doing, we’re allowing the process to take us somewhere we don’t know yet.

We shared childhood memories of Garfield and Snoopy; Charlotte showed me an old photo of her laying down next to an outline of Snoopy she’d made from some coins. I told her how I used to draw Garfields for my peers at school, as a kind of currency to get them to like me or be nice to me / make me feel good. My bedroom was also covered in these drawings on sheets of ‘computer paper’ my dad would bring home from work.

“I’m curious about what happens when we are both in the frame. I loved sharing the frame together. I love knowing, being known and showing that through the photos. It feels really good to be in a picture with someone I have known for a long time, to think of the journey that has got us there, the part where there’s a confluence. A confluence of childhood cartoons!” (Charlotte’s reflection)

Looking at Charlotte’s childhood photos, which keep drawing her in, we started to think about who we were before we were crushed and who we might have become if we had not been crushed. There is a sense of freeness in those photographs that although she doesn’t feel she was free as a child and doesn’t want to go back there, she had not been crushed at this point and there’s something in that. We took photos of Charlotte channelling the essence of that childhood energy from some old photo-booth pictures.

In these next portraits Charlotte is showing what masking looks like, disappointment, polite smiles and being ground down. Feelings that she knows well. For me crushed is about being shushed and made to feel grateful for crumbs. These pictures are tragi-comic, they make us laugh but they are also relatable and depressing. We know that when we feel like this we are not alone.

We meet in cafés and talk about our lives. During one of these conversations I noticed that Charlotte likes to eat jam sandwiches and we remarked upon the classed nature of this snack. We played with this in the studio, in one of the photographs, Charlotte is wearing a jam sandwich as though it is a fascinator and she is attending a fancy, high-class event. We also played with queering the jam sandwich by flagging it in Charlotte’s back pocket. Charlotte is clearly a jam sandwich bottom.

 Although we approached this sequence through a classed lens, we are working at other intersections too, especially fat, where we are making unprecedented imagery of fatness.

“Through our working process I am feeling competent, expressive, strong, intelligent, courageous, confident, bold, vulnerable and safe enough, able to relate, hopeful, excited, curious, happy, etc. These are therapeutic outcomes from a process that is relational, aesthetic, technical and technological, embodied, experimental, intellectual, conversational, philosophical, political, and so on. We are already creating our own phototherapy.” (Charlotte’s reflection 2025)

Watch this space - more to come…