Since 1992, the British government has initiated 14 strategies, 689 policies and ten targets as part of various efforts to curb obesity in the UK. Despite this, one in four people in England today is obese — defined as having a BMI of more than 30 — with obesity overtaking tobacco as the country’s leading cause of death in 2021. Elsewhere, new research suggests that people who previously lived with obesity carry the psychological effects after losing weight, often negatively imposing on their mental health. For Abbie Trayler-Smith, who was a teenager when John Major introduced Britain’s first government-centred preventative public health strategy strategy in 1992, obesity statistics and the kind of critical, dehumanising headlines that routinely accompany them are profoundly personal.
Aged 11, the Welsh photographer asked classmates to sign her autograph book ahead of moving to secondary school, and her crush at the time simply wrote, “To Abbie I hope you lose weight from Mark”; another message, from a family member, reads “Abbie, ‘puddgy pants’ love & wishes Simon”. Her own diary entries are similarly disheartening: when she was 15 she penned a list of reasons to lose weight, including “no more hassle from mum and dad” and “I would have a better chance in life”. The word “FAT” was Tipp-Ex’d onto the cover of a school book. Nearly 20 years on, Abbie would attend a press conference for health services to teenagers and meet Shannon, a 14-year-old who reflected part of her younger self, but whose confidence surpassed anything teen Abbie could have conceived.
“Have you ever had that, where the whole room just goes really quiet? Shannon read a poem on behalf of Shine [a community-based weight management programme for 10 to 17-year-olds living with obesity] and I got shivers up my spine,” she recalls, describing that initial encounter. Impressed by the teenager’s conviction, and keen to take her picture for a new series she was planning, she introduced herself. “I was really frank and just said, ‘My name is Abbie and I want to do a project on teenage obesity. I was a fat teenager and I wondered if there’s any chance I could have a cup of tea with you’.” Shot over 12 years and published this month by GOST, Kiss It! documents the pair’s subsequent collaboration.
“I was really sick of how obesity was portrayed in the media and how fat people are judged, that’s what I wanted to challenge,” continues the photographer, alluding to her umbrella project The Big O, an intimate study of obesity in children and teenagers, of which Kiss It! is a chapter. “How we talk about obesity informs how we address it, so we need to start talking about it in a different way.” Finding parallels in the fears attributed to cancer diagnoses, she adapted the familiar euphemism — underscoring the significance both of language and obesity’s grip on one’s psyche — and began photographing other young people she met through Shine. While Shannon quickly became her protagonist, her work with the boys of The Big O was highlighted in a 2019 collaboration with The Wellcome Collection, Obesity and Britain’s boys; Shannon’s younger brother Kieran was amongst those featured.
Including her personal diaries in the new book was never really meant to happen, Abbie says, it but became a way to navigate any suggestions of voyeurism. “It’s also a kind of visual reference to what’s going on behind the scenes. What was going on in my mind as a teenager is reflected in those kids in some form or another,” she says. “And I’m asking them to be courageous, stand up in a project about being fat, that has obesity in the title — it was important I show that this work is a collaboration.”
Furthermore, she hopes people with some distance from the issue will be able to identify with the broader insecurities that surface during adolescence. “Those years are the most awkward of our lives, so I’m hoping to tap into that wider sense of discomfort,” she says. “But also, when you’re fat, you wear your issue for all to see. And everyone who’s lived with obesity gets a bit sick of knowing what everybody is thinking about them.”
First photographing Shannon in her garden in Sheffield, Abbie’s images foreground the transition from teen to adulthood with a warm, careful consideration that often translates as a glow: documenting the hairstyles and the boyfriends; the major life events and quiet everyday moments. “She’s very comfortable in front of the camera and always has an opinion, but she’s never vetoed anything,” Abbie says of their relationship, which over the past decade has become a rich, supportive friendship. “She’s got a creative mind and understands that if you’re going to open yourself up to a photographer, you might as well be real with it.” The only time the pair haven’t been aligned was during the editing process for the book, but this was quickly remedied. “I just said, ‘I hear you, but this isn’t a family album.’ She totally got it, and I think she’s quite proud [on the whole] — when an image went into the World Press Photo in 2014 she came down and was posing in front of it.”
This openness, both in terms of sharing your life and being in front of the camera, contrasts with Abbie’s experiences elsewhere, having spent ten years trying to approach NHS obesity clinics directly about the project. “It is such a sensitive subject,” she says, “people who work in obesity in the UK themselves say it’s the biggest taboo, which is kind of bizarre when you think of all the things we openly discuss. But apparently we can’t have a judgement-free conversation around it?”
Indeed, despite better understanding of the issue’s nuances and diverse contributing factors, as well as the effect continued negligence from successive governments has on the social landscape that produces unhealthy lifestyles, there remains a firm stigma around obesity. Enforced via playground discrimination, at the workplace or in harmful pop culture trends, the psychological damage to the individual can be as distressing as the strain on physical health.
With Kiss It!, which is Abbie’s debut monograph, the photographer borrows her title from Shannon’s own response to school yard gossip, echoing the statement she had tattooed on her bum at 16. Realised in red capitals on the book’s pink cloth front, the words boldly demand that you pay attention. “I’ve always loved it, the sentiment — not just as a fuck you to the bullies, but just about life,” Abbie says. “I’m not a big tattoo person, but when I saw it I was just like, ‘that is amazing’. Then when I realised the book was going to be about her, it was the most obvious title, almost like she’d picked it. It’s playful too, that’s what I hope comes across.”
While the physicality of a book lends itself to a conclusion, Abbie has no immediate plans to stop taking Shannon’s photo, and sees Kiss It! as a chapter of something potentially greater. “Everything’s open all the time, and I’ve already said to her, ‘Shannon, I can’t stop photographing you now’ — especially if she gets married, has kids. As long as she’s happy, I’ll take the odd picture, because it’s quite a privileged thing to be able to do, documenting someone who’s not in your family, from a child to an older person.” In terms of Abbie’s own story, the collaboration with Shannon and revisiting her teenage words, has been deeply reparative. “I wasn’t expecting to have such a healing journey, or that it would enable me to inquire and untangle what’s been going on with me,” she says. “So that’s been amazing, more than a bonus.”
‘Kiss It!’ by Abbie Trayler-Smith will be published by GOST Books in June 2023.
Credits
All images courtesy Abbie Trayler-Smith and GOST