Icon of the Week: Coco Cottam

by Mary Lawrence Ware | January 26, 2025

Coco Cottam is no stranger to Icon of the Week. A former features director herself, Coco knows the highs and lows of the Icon cycle far better than I do. But as much as we here at The Isis might wish this to be the reason why Coco is so well known across Oxford, it most certainly is not. Coco is a big name on campus as a prolific photographer, writer, producer, director, and founder of Peach Productions. She is also an editor of the Oxford Review of Books and master’s student in creative writing.

 

The Isis, however, is at the root of one of Coco’s many enterprises. Coco got into the niche of ball photography through an Isis competition, then going on to photograph the Christ Church commemoration ball in 2022 as her first gig. Nowadays, her portfolio and clients reach far beyond the drunken merrymakers of Oxford, photographing events in London and celebrities such as Luca Guadagnino and Greg Williams, doing editorial work, and working on projects with a longtime icon of her own, Dafydd Jones.

 

Jones, Coco shares, is at the root of a longtime fascination with society photography, which she admires for having “captured something that I don’t think even existed.”

 

Nowadays, she finds it to be a bit more challenging to replicate the carefree, shameless debauchery seen in ‘80s society photography where the discipline thrived amidst “a time when they weren’t so aware that they were being photographed. I think now, even at balls I’ll take a photo of [people], and they’ll come up to me and be like ‘can you not publish that online’… there’s so much more of a sense of awareness of your image that there wasn’t then.”

 

“Nowadays,” she quips, “people are aware that whatever photos I take will go on a Google drive and at a Union party. Some of them think they’re going to be a PM in 20 years.”

 

This increased awareness is, however, a massive roadblock to the craft. “My whole aim photographing is to not be seen,” she notes. According to Coco, when people can tell they’re being watched, the magic often stops. Coco’s solution? “Go into the bushes, find all of the rankest, randomest stuff going on. And then you also do all of the smiling stuff for the first few hours,” she adds.

 

The two subjects that on principle never make the cut? Commando dancers flipping about, inevitably flashing the camera, and paralytic drunks getting carted off by paramedics, both of which, according to Coco, happen more often than not.

 

Coco’s observant nature, evident in her approach to photography, also extends into her writing. “The best photos I’ve taken is where you can put a story into them,” she notes. “And the best writing I’ve done is where you can put an image into [it].”

 

Indeed, in her own words, there is a deeply visual element to her writing. Singing the praises of the vignette and Ernaux-esque photographic prose, she likens her ideal writing to having the feeling of a zoetrope, “Jumping through a story kind of as a series of images.”

 

The disciplines also serve a similar purpose in her life. “I’m such a hoarder,” she laughs. “I write and I take photographs because I don’t trust myself to hold onto things. The impulse to photograph something or else you’ll forget is so embedded in my mind. And writing is a way of documenting myself. Or… documenting stories that come up in my head.”

 

She suddenly recalls with excitement, “I just started screenwriting like a couple months ago!” This, she tells me, is where her passions for photography and writing have the clearest and strongest overlap. “Suddenly I’m putting images and dialogue together and they’re kind of working with each other in a way that I feel like a lot of my writing is very focused on visuals—back to this photographic, vignette-y style.”

 

Screenwriting seems a natural progression from one of Coco’s most central creative disciplines: playwriting. Coco is perhaps best known across Oxford as a co-founder of Peach Productions. Founded in her first year with her friend, Lydia Free, Peach Productions has since established itself as a powerful force in the Oxford theatre scene, putting on eight different productions at Oxford, three of them being original works by Coco. One of those original works, Wishbone, later went on tour to London and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

 

Behind Peach’s impressive track record is a beginning marked by friendship turned partnership, and a desire to find a true home amidst the somewhat daunting Oxford theatre scene. After Coco wrote a play which Lydia directed for OUDS’ annual Cuppers competition for freshers, they both found themselves enamoured with the theatre world. However, Coco notes that entry into this world was not immediately a harmonious one. “It was just a huge clique. Everyone knew everyone… there were like, ‘celebrities’—I was terrified, it was so not me.”  It was also at this point that Coco decided her passion was certainly not acting, which she had previously seen as her only in to the world of student theatre; all she wanted to do was write. The duo put on a couple plays by themselves before Lydia proposed, “If you want to write a play for next year, I will direct it, but you need to write it in like the next month.”

 

In terms of what makes a Peach Production piece unique and what draws Coco to choose one play over another, she says, “I’m very interested in psychological, quite domestic dramas.”

“I want to feel incredibly tense,” she states. “I’m after high stakes, even in the most mundane of settings, to feel like the characters need things.” This is something she feels she’s gradually learned to centre in her recent writing compared to her earlier work. She cites Patrick Marber and Annie Baker as two extreme opposites in terms of their writing who both inspire her in that they manage to make their audiences feel “horrible the whole way through.”

 

Typically, “complex” and “uneasy” are Coco’s adjectives of choice for the pieces she puts on, but, regarding Peach’s upcoming production of Into the Woods, she notes that it is “totally different from stuff we’ve put on before.” In many ways, this is perhaps attributable to it being the first musical Peach Productions has ever put on, a genre that Coco admitted she is certainly less comfortable with. However, this hasn’t dampened her enthusiasm for the project. Into the Woods is an exciting project for Coco, not only as a lover of fairy tales, but also because it is the group’s first piece at the Oxford Playhouse – their largest venue yet. “Visually, it’s so exciting to be doing something so big.”

 

So, what’s next up for Coco? Ideally, a nice mix of work and play. She points to the I Love NY keychain she bought at a charity shop; a trip to New York City to visit a close friend is high on the bucket list. After that, she dreams of a Peruvian pilgrimage through the Andes as research for a screen adaptation of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. And perhaps the strongest indicator of her curiosity and open-mindedness: her proposal for a trip to the Ultimate Picture Palace to go see the new Robbie-Williams-as-a-monkey biopic. “If you wanna go sometime next week, I’d be up for that.”∎

 

Words by Mary Lawrence Ware. Image courtesy of Coco Cottam.