When I casually suggested to Charlotte Cooper, 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 some consideration – nervous about being photographed, she sent me a compelling email titled ‘Yes to Pics’!

Charlotte Cooper and Holly Revell - Fat Body work - 2025

“I’d always felt embarrassed by the way I hold my hand to help me get more leverage when I get up from the floor but Kay described it as a “power knuckle” and that helped!” (From Fat Body Work)

Our 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 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 have 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 coloured 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…

'CRUSHED'

Class…

“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 reflections 12/2025)