Some moments in life demand to be photographed. These sisters recalled an image I had seen before, maybe in Aperture Magazine or on . The danger is that the photo-obsessive only sees echoes of other photos.

The sisters were attending Gerard M Burns’ Mother Glasgow event, which featured a painting of the mother of comedian Sanjeev Kohli (right). He was on good form and happy to see Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar (left).

It remains to be seen if the Labour Party can emerge from its deep unpopularity. One person who might know is psephologist John Curtice, here asking a question at Lea Ypi’s talk.

On Sunday, 8 March, my wife texted me to say that there was a fire at Central Station. By the time I got there, the smoke was rising in huge plumes.

An advertising hoarding illuminates the smoke, making it look like a John Martin painting.

I found it was too brutal to stay for long.

The following day, I took a look at the wreckage and grimly noted that The Blue Lagoon was barely touched.

A walk to the Southside of Glasgow shows how beautiful architecture can be.

A topic that was discussed at the ACX Edinburgh meet-up after a visit to the distinctly uninspiring Scottish parliament. Photography was discouraged, so this was taken surreptitiously.

I went there after getting the first train of the day to Cupar to do a parkrun. These people were sleeping in the station after a night out.

But why do we no longer have nice buildings?

Behind the scenes photo of the Glasgow Community Energy team.

From Eid.

Artist John Butler before a screening of Arda, his new satire of the post-apocalyptic dreams of Silicon Valley.

Fiona Banner at The Common Guild.

Homage to Robert Frank

Homage to Bernd and Hilla Becher.

A hair-raising trip to Whitby.

Laura had wanted to visit for her birthday.

Despite this photo, the place seemed to be thriving.

Last summer, when stuck for something to listen to, I downloaded the playlist of the 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die book. It was amazing to hear so many classics in quick succession, plus a few previously unknown to me.

After a while, I began spotting patterns:

• They began with a distinctive hook.

• There was a sense of restrained vitality.

• The songs sounded like nothing else.

• All stood up to repeated listens.

There are exceptions, of course, but I think this list of patterns is solid for all the finest singles.

I recalled this experience after learning that Magnum and The Photographers’ Gallery (TPG) are hosting Odyssey, a sale of individual prints by famous photographers. I experienced a sense of wonder at seeing these iconic pictures together in one place.

In the photography world, as in pop music, the individual image is seen as lesser than the series. There are occasional photographs that escape their origins, like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl, and Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl. But aficionados tend to elevate the photobook as a higher art form, just as music snobs elevate the LP.

Such people — and I am one of these — enjoy the complex interrelationships of photographs and the way meaning is enhanced by their sequence. Books like Robert Frank’s The Americans or William Klein’s New York have the range and impact of a novel. They make one realise that even a “bad photo” can be compelling. By contrast, a single image, however impressive, can feel isolated.

“Anyone can take a great picture,” writes Alec Soth. “But very few people can put together a great collection... the art, for me, is in the collection and interplay of images.”

Ironically, this quote appears in the 1001 Photographs You Must See In Your Lifetime, where almost every photographer is represented by a single picture. It feels like Soth is acknowledging that his image from the Sleeping by the Mississippi series is not as immediately catchy as others in the book.

With the Magnum/TPG sale, there are a few photographs that not only stand alone but, like this one by Raúl Cañibano, make you want to see everything else they have done.

Others are interesting because they echo other famous works. For instance, George Rodger, one of the co-founders of Magnum, made many iconic photos. However, this one gains extra resonance if you know his life.

Ernest Cole, like Daido Moriyama around the same time, intrigues the viewer by not taking nice, clean, focused photos. When surrounded by abundance, professionalism quickly feels staid. There has to be something difficult or awkward to hold the attention. What is the hook? A classic single has one, why not a photo?

According to Roland Barthes, a compelling photograph consists of a studium (the scene depicted) and a punctum (the detail that draws you back). What is the punctum of this image? Does it, like Uncle Vanya, stand alone?

To go deeper into this topic, I went straight to the source and asked some of the photographers this question:

Many photographers work across series where each image adds context to the next. What do you think about the single, standalone photograph?

Here, alongside their Odyssey photographs, are the responses of Mark Power, Lúa Ribeira, Mário Macilau and Emin Özmen.

Mark Power

I tend to pursue long-term projects, which usually culminate in books. In these books, my pictures are very carefully sequenced, using subject, form, light and colour (if appropriate) as a basis for placing one image after another. So yes, it would be right to say that I “work in series, where each image is in context to the next”. However, I like to think that any/all my pictures can also exist outside of the context of a book or an exhibition, and instead stand alone.

Since I often give my pictures very little context (if they are captioned at all, then it’s usually only with place and date), this encourages the viewer, the reader or, indeed, the owner of a print to construct their own narrative, which may, or may not, be ’true’.

Photography’s somewhat slippery relationship to fact and fiction, reality and imagination, is a great strength. I try, whenever possible, to take advantage of this ambiguity. My picture in the Square Print Sale is, I think, a good example of this slipperiness, since it doesn’t immediately explain itself. What is this structure? Who are these people? Why is one hugging, while the other stands placidly, arms at their side? Why is one of them wearing a single, red glove? And on and on...

In my latest book, FASHION, there are no captions whatsoever. The pictures are taken out of context so that, most of the time, the reader has no idea what they’re looking at. Traditional concepts of time and place are blurred, and all that’s left are images. These, when sequenced with others, are like words in a sentence, but they are sentences without meaning, whimsical, nonsensical, yet intentional.

Lúa Ribeira

I work with groups of images, and I am interested in the universe that they can create all together. But I also believe in the strength of a standalone image. Some images you can almost enter and invite reflection rather than explanation. I enjoy ambiguity in images, instead of a closed meaning.

Mário Macilau

I usually work on long-term projects, building series that allow each photograph to gain deeper meaning through context and continuity. For me, the process is not about creating isolated images first and then trying to connect them later. It is the opposite. The series grows from a long engagement with people, places, and ideas. Through that process, each singular image becomes stronger.

Even so, I believe a single photograph can carry great power. One image can hold silence, tension, and emotion, and it can open space for reflection. It may not explain everything, but it can invite the viewer to look more carefully and to think beyond what is immediately visible.

In my practice, every photograph is part of a broader narrative, but it should still be able to stand on its own. A strong image carries the presence of the person, the atmosphere of the place, and the weight of that encounter.

So while I work primarily in series, my intention is always to build bodies of work where each photograph has its own voice and strength, and where the dialogue between images deepens their meaning rather than replacing it.

Emin Özmen

This single image is part of my long-term project about Istanbul, focusing mostly on water and its relationship with the Stamboulian identity. I have always seen Istanbul as an exceptional city, and I think ‘water’ is what characterises it best. Opening like a curtain between West and East, it connects and separates.

Seas and straits cross and embrace it. People and animals revel in it, nature often flourishes, and the boats pass by, connecting the shores and the humans to each other. Everything becomes one, a whole that is alternately surprising, mystical, poetic, funny, joyful, and melancholic. It brings people together, beyond differences and cultures, water offers infinite possibilities. A rather universal and rare feeling.

The Odyssey Square Print Sale ends this Sunday, 29 March.

Ivor Novella

The Smiths: A Novella by Michael Bracewell

Short sentences. Paragraphs averaging two sentences long. Michael Bracewell’s The Smiths has the feel of a pop single, say ‘Hand in Glove’, which Bracewell first heard on the radio in 1983. It was love at first listen…

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a month ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Neil Scott

Short sentences. Paragraphs averaging two sentences long. Michael Bracewell’s The Smiths has the feel of a pop single, say ‘Hand in Glove’, which he first heard on the radio in 1983. It was love at first listen.

These opening seconds announced a life-changing visitation out of absolutely nowhere. Mysterious, portentous, thrilling, yet profoundly charming. A sudden gale, blood temperature, roaring down an empty street on a summer night.

Forty-three years on, the experience of hearing The Smiths inspired this curious little novella.

And it is little: a mere 17,000 words, short even for a novella. The book’s designers have reduced the line length to ensure it achieves a respectable 110 pages. But it is frustrating to read as my eyes lost their mooring in the broad margins.

Once I got used to the typesetting, the prose is superb — arch, pithy and resonant. It compels the reader to go back to the album and experience the songs with refreshed ears. And while Bracewell’s intoxicated descriptions inevitably pale next to the wounded urgency of the Smiths’ first four albums (The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow, Meat is Murder, and The Queen is Dead), I was grateful for the nudge.

At a time when Morrissey’s reputation sits somewhere between Engelbert Humperdinck and Enoch Powell, writing about The Smiths is a risk. To avoid such issues, Bracewell creates a fantasy autofiction in which he leads the actress Carole Bouquet (That Obscure Object of Desire, For Your Eyes Only) through the London of his twenties. It was a time when Bracewell was stuck working in a menial civil service job:

There was no grade of clerical officer lower than the grade I occupied, and my attitude to the job was that of an overweight ghost assigned to haunt a car park.

The Smiths were his saviour, a glimpse of a world of intelligence and glamour. The litany of icons who inhabit Morrissey’s outsider pantheon —Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Pat Phoenix, Billy Fury, Candy Darling, Shelagh Delaney — are still strangely unassimilable by the mainstream. Even as queer art becomes hegemonic, such figures, like Morrissey himself, resist commodification.

Bracewell identifies Morrissey as a regional Georgian poet transposed to ‘hinterland estates, dank subways, bank holiday fairgrounds and soot-blackened tombstones, engineering brick and wet precincts.’ How bracing! It is difficult not to be nostalgic for what has been lost, however grim it was at the time.

But this is not a melancholy book. By the end, Bracewell is recalling ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ and asking, “How could something so funny be so sad?” And just like The Smiths’ music, this book is both.

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The Smiths: A Novella
by Michael Bracewell
128 pp., £14.99, June 2026, ISBN 978 1 399 63860 9
White Rabbit Books,

Here is a playlist I created of songs mentioned in the novella.

Each video follows the same formula: stop someone in the street, have a brief chat, take a few flattering photos, and finally show the person how beautiful they look while sentimental music plays in the background.

I hate the aesthetic. For me, it recalls what Nabokov condemned with the Russian word poshlust: “Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest.”

It could also be sour grapes on my part for not having had the idea first. Buchanan Street is one of the three streets I documented last year, and I have taken similar portraits to his. Yet this guy is on the BBC.

Nevertheless, much of Cravo’s popularity on Instagram (122K followers compared to a mere 35K on TikTok) is likely because he uses Meta’s smart glasses to record the interaction. It appears that, having failed to convince people to migrate to the Metaverse, the company formerly known as Facebook is embedding its technology in regular glasses and presumably using its algorithm to boost the visibility of those who wear them. Those he meets have no idea that he is recording them, but I have been told by people who have met him that he promises to delete footage of those who say no.

While some people clearly love Cravo’s stylised portraits, the main reason they watch is because of the sense of jeopardy in speaking to strangers. The final photo is relatively unimportant, but the encounter itself is filled with potential vulnerability.

As Keir Starmer says, we have become “an island of strangers.” Not because of mass immigration, but because many find it impossible to speak to someone they don’t know. With ubiquitous headphones and eyes glued to their smartphones, young people “don’t know how to conduct conversations.”1

The decline of small talk is a catastrophe that, according to Viv Groskop, is leading to a “world of intense and often unnecessary division.” Perhaps this is why so many are obsessed with street interactions on social media.

I was sent Groskop’s article by a friend who suggested that I write tips for talking to new people. “You have a lot of experience,” Caspar said. “Maybe they would find it useful.”

Indeed, I find it easy to talk to people, no matter who they are. Perhaps the world would benefit from developing these skills. Here, behind the paywall, are my secrets to speaking with strangers …

Subscribe to view or send me a message if you want to read and don’t have the cash.

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Following the success of Liverpool as European Capital of Culture in 2008, the then Culture Secretary Andy Burnham announced the government was looking to establish a British equivalent.

Every four years, areas would compete to hold the title of UK City of Culture, with the winner receiving a cash boost and the opportunity to host events such as the Turner Prize, the Brit Awards, the Man Booker Prize and the Stirling Prize.1 Burnham, now King of the North (aka Mayor of Manchester), thought that the arts were too London-centric and that, given the levels of state funding, the provinces should get a piece of the action.

Derry-Londonderry was selected as the UK’s first City of Culture. My wife and I visited in 2013 and were impressed by how well they had integrated art into historically charged sites such as old barracks. It was also nice to have an arbitrary excuse to visit a new place.

In 2017, we met up with friends in Hull and enjoyed a pleasant weekend of wandering around the gentrified docks and town centre.

COVID disrupted Coventry’s plans in 2021. However, during a family visit, we managed to pop into the Turner Prize exhibition, which for some reason consisted entirely of collectives.

Having seen all these previous cities of culture, I felt obliged to make the trip to Bradford.

My day started badly with a delayed train—how very British!—and I worried that I wouldn’t make it to Bradford, but we departed a mere 30 minutes later than scheduled.

At Preston, I chatted with JJ, who was on his way to Burnley. I mentioned that I was going to Bradford. He grimaced:

“Bradford is a proper shithole. You don’t want to go to Bradford. Whoever chose it for City of Culture must need their head seeing to … though if you want a curry, go to Akbar’s.”

Contrary to JJ, my initial impressions of Bradford were positive. The council had done a good job of pedestrianising the town centre with a huge, welcoming square after exiting the station. It felt clean and functional, far from the vision of Britain—aka The Yookay—one sees on X.

The Yookay, for those who haven’t been keeping up with the dozens of explainer articles,2 was originally coined by Welsh critic Raymond Williams to convey the alienation of communities from neoliberalism. The phrase now flourishes as a term to describe the weird hybrid culture emerging in Britain after mass migration.

The chief proponent of the Yookay is the anonymous X user, Drukpa Kunley, one of the extremely online right-wing accounts that provides the memes for politicians like Rupert Lowe, Nigel Farage, and Robert Jenrick. Some terms popularised by Kunley include: Boriswave, Nick 30 ans, and, of course, the Yookay.

Because of this discourse, I was primed to see disarray and atavism … but there was barely anything that resembled the toxic stream of disorder shared in clips online.

I walked to the Turner Prize exhibition via the school that was the centre of the discussion about multiculturalism in the 1980s. This is an area that is, apparently, incredibly segregated, yet didn’t seem terribly exotic.

The 2025 Turner Prize was won by Nnena Kalu, an autistic British-Nigerian artist. Her outsider art is obsessive and removed from all cynicism, but it left me nonplussed.

Mohammed Sami’s accomplished paintings appear to connect with the history of Iraq’s bloody wars. Impressive, but not groundbreaking.

I was curious to see the work of Rene Matić—whose photography engages with the vexed topic of contemporary British identity—but was left underwhelmed. At 27, Matić was the youngest person ever to be nominated for the prize, and their space was rather jejune with simple political points and predictable juxtapositions. Hopefully, they will develop a more nuanced approach to image-making.

It felt especially lacking when compared to the immersive, fertile world created by Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa.

With its biennials and art fairs, the contemporary art world is inherently cosmopolitan. It maintains the dream of liberal internationalism at a time of rising nationalism.

I asked one of the guides where else I should go in Bradford. She suggested leaving Bradford and going to Haworth, where the Brontë sisters grew up. I told her it was too far, but I might watch the new Wuthering Heights.

I walked back into town and saw a wave of Bradford City AFC fans walking towards the stadium ahead of their match with Peterborough United. Football has become a global phenomenon, perhaps the closest the world has to a common culture, but in Bradford it still felt like a traditional working-class game.

There is an area of Bradford known as Little Germany, because of the number of German-Jewish textile companies that were based there, particularly after the Franco-Prussian War. The Hamm Strasse ring road was, however, named after the town’s twinning with Hamm in the Ruhr valley in 1976.

As a fan of psychogeography, I abandoned Google Maps and did a dérive to the outlying suburbs. The streets were slightly more shabby, but more because of poverty than alienation. There were even a few shops catering for the pre-Brexit Eastern European community.

With Jim Ratcliffe’s recent comments about immigration and Nigel Farage currently on course for 10 Downing Street, the question of British culture has become a hot topic. What would it mean to integrate into a culture that has no clear sense of identity?

Yet, these debates feel like an indulgence at a time when AI and social media algorithms are accelerating the culture into strange new places. I spotted AI-generated logos on shops all over Bradford.

Similarly, the forces of capitalism have led the centre of Bradford to submit almost completely to international fast food chains and fashion retailers.

It is not inconceivable that all culture becomes American culture with a different accent. Take the catchy song ‘Bradford Boy’ by MC Chippy, which I discovered on Drukpa’s entertaining Yookay playlist.

On the train home, I was struck by the number of factories and mills along the Pennine valley. This landscape was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that was itself fuelled by the East India Company’s tariffs on cotton. Whether now or back in the nineteenth century, it’s difficult not to feel overawed by the power of capital to alter lives.

We only get a distorted perspective on a place when it only seen vicariously online. To get a fuller picture, I would urge everyone to visit cities like Bradford in person.

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When the Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard wrote that the national is parochial, he meant that it is an abstraction not experienced through the senses. He offered the example of James Joyce, who is seen as a great Irish novelist, yet focused exclusively on the lives of Dubliners. For Leonard, it was Joyce’s emphasis on local experience that made his art universal.

And what about photography? While it can capture sensory evidence, what we photograph is often predetermined by our expectations, as I found out last weekend when meeting with friends in Budapest.

We decided on Budapest because it is exactly equidistant between Glasgow and Cyprus, where one friend lives. But I was also curious to see what decades of national populism have done to the country.

For a long time, Hungary was seen as the black sheep of Europe, but it increasingly feels like a harbinger. The anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, pro-natalist, and pro-traditional policies of Viktor Orbán have provided inspiration for nationalists all over the world. What does this possible future look like?

The first thing you notice is that it is an unnervingly quiet city. There are no buskers, barely any beggars. Coming from the chaos of Glasgow, it was eerie.

It’s also an extraordinarily grand city, with the neo-Gothic parliament showing the wealth of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Every so often, the grand narrative is punctuated by one of the many disruptions in Hungarian history. A monument to the crushing of the 1956 revolution demonstrates how nationalist memories are formed.

The eventual collapse of communism saw Hungary integrated into the free market, which they celebrate with statues to George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, as well as the Milton Friedman University.

Hungary was the only country within the EU to maintain positive relations with Russia after the Ukraine War. Propaganda posters showing Ursula von der Leyen encouraging financial handouts to Volodymyr Zelenskyy were, to my eyes, extremely jarring.

Nevertheless, I only saw one anti-Orbán sticker. Perhaps the government are efficient at removing them, or the punishments are too harsh. Either way, polls suggest Orbán’s Fidesz party are going to lose the forthcoming elections.

The reason for their unpopularity is corruption, with cronies like Lőrinc Mészáros getting wealthy from state procurement. The construction of the impressive new Museum of Ethnography is one contract the oligarch won recently.

One of the oddest things in Budapest is the series of Scruton cafés dotted over the city. The English philosopher is a minor figure in his home country but a hero in central Europe for supporting conservatism at a time when the only ideas on offer were Marxism-Leninism. The café I went to was pleasant and full of books, but I am not sure if it would make a profit (it is supported by a billion-euro state endowment). Which intellectual would you dedicate a chain of cafés to?

The only pilgrimage I made in Budapest was to the gymnasium where John von Neumann was taught mathematics by László Rátz. This episode was memorably captured in ’s 2017 post The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project.

I stopped off at the school on the way to Széchenyi Thermal Baths, an extraordinary spa complex opened a year before the First World War. This was perhaps the highlight of the trip and an amazing example of public luxury.

Other highlights included:

The brilliantly curated Robert Capa museum, which not only tells the story of Capa but also provides space to exhibit contemporary photographers like Zoltán Tombor.

And the glorious St. Stephen’s Basilica.

By the end of the trip, I didn’t feel I had grasped the sensory reality of Budapest. But I had a much clearer understanding of how the national story was formed and how it can cast a shadow over the local present.

[People] aren’t actually part of the world around them. They are somewhere else. You are ultimately capturing an absence of something rather than a presence of someone. They are ghosts in their own space.

Even when we’re not on the phone, I feel that our presence has diminished. We are scattered, distracted, and alienated from those around us.

Thankfully, there are still a few moments of engagement left in the world, moments like The Tarzan Challenge.

The Tarzan Challenge is deceptively simple: hold on to a bar for 100 seconds and win £100. The catch is that the bar rotates, requiring constant readjustment, which means very few people succeed.

Some people think it is a scam, but it’s not like find the lady, which is impossible to win. It is more of a psychological trick that relies on the participants’ self-confidence.

The guy in the hat has been running the Tarzan Challenge in Glasgow for years. Every few months, he pops up on Buchanan Street hoping to ensnare some new hopefuls.

Indeed, it was striking how many of the people participating were immigrants to Glasgow or children …

In both cases, they were presumably unaware of the low chances of success.

It usually didn’t take more than 30 seconds for them to realise their mistake.

Given that holding the bar requires two hands, it is one of the few places where no one uses a mobile phone.

Even so, the spectacle was compelling enough for the crowds to remain focused on what was happening rather than reaching for their mobile.

All the men could be seen imagining how they might do … could they be the one?

Could they stay present despite the cheering?

The crowd were willing them on.

But it’s difficult … painful, even. Although they all failed, they succeeded in giving us all a moment away from the phone.

Such are the kind of statements that we might associate with poor mental health. In each case, there is an ‘I’ that suffers because of the demands placed upon it. The ‘I’ that creates the illusion of being separate from the world.

Therapy is the attempt to reconcile that ‘I’ to reality. In Freud’s memorable phrase, psychoanalysis helps turn “hysterical misery into common unhappiness”. Sadly, for Freudians, the default fix for mental health is no longer years of talk therapy but mindfulness.

Photography and Mindfulness

Derived from Buddhist meditation, mindfulness is a catch-all term for a sense of embodied attentiveness. The NHS guide suggests taking notice of “thoughts, feelings, body sensations and the world around you.”

It is easy to see how photography might be used for mindfulness.1 The camera is an externalised ‘I’, and the images we create help us check if our perceptions correspond with reality. Combine that with a long walk, and you have an excellent way of escaping the prison of the mind.

This week, I set an intention to be more mindful in my photography; to stay with my feelings and experience the outside world as it is, rather than listening to music to distract me from my thoughts.

And it worked … sort of. I was relaxed, at least. But is that enough at a time of political turmoil?

One common critique of mindfulness is that it encourages people to quietly accept the injustices of the world rather than fix them. Like anti-depressants and CBT, mindfulness rarely addresses the structural causes of mental health problems.

Jo Spence and Phototherapy

Enter Jo Spence (1934-1992), a photographer and self-described cultural sniper who, along with therapist Rosy Martin, proposed an alternative to psychoanalysis in the form of phototherapy.2

For Spence, it wasn’t enough to be reconciled with the world; the point was to change it. In collaboration with people like Rosy Martin and Terry Dennett, she used Marxism and Psychoanalysis to not just examine the past but to critique the present.

As Malcolm Dickson, who curated an exhibition of her work at Street Level Photoworks, said: “Jo believed that […] photography is a tool that can be used by everyone in any situation for self-knowledge, personal growth and of course social critique.”

In Spare Rib, Spence joined other radical second-wave feminists in challenging beauty standards, sexual politics, and the insanity of nuclear weapons. Spence learned to deconstruct everything from her upbringing and the fairytales she grew up with to her career as a commercial photographer.

Like John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, Spence saw conventional art history as an expression of patriarchal and capitalist domination. She sought to challenge the imperatives of advertising by showing how dissonant it appears when juxtaposed with normal people.3 In 1984, under these influences, Spence and Martin developed a new psychological cure …

Phototherapy (not to be confused with the light therapy of the same name) attempts to use photography as a tool for both mental health and political consciousness raising.

The basic premise is that two people, in collaboration, discuss past traumas and then perform them for the camera. In making the image, there is an opportunity to reframe, objectify and overcome the trauma.

It is extremely cringeworthy to see Jo Spence pretending to be a baby. But cringe is external judgment reflected inward. If we can sit with cringe, perhaps we can sit with trauma.

As Rosy Martin put it in a 1987 interview with the BBC:

“People seem to think, ‘Why on earth should you want to put your private distresses on public display?’ My answer to that is that they’re not just my own personal distresses. A lot of them have much more general ramifications.”

As well as being a tool for mental health, Phototherapy is also a way of rethinking portrait photography. Spence and Martin’s list of differences between the two is worth studying:

While the photos she made aren’t to everyone’s taste—a recent retrospective was titled Beyond the Perfect Image—they are sufficiently different to repay close attention. It is also fascinating to see how she developed as an artist.

Her angrier images from the eighties give way to textured work like The Final Project, made while she was dying of leukaemia. Spence projected double exposures to create oceanic images. It is as if, in reconciling herself to death, she opened herself up to being egoless.

It is a stark reminder that therapy is always a process. Both mindfulness and phototherapy can be part of that process, but never a destination. In a note from January 1992, found after her death, Spence asks that any retrospective of her work finish with her being engaged with the world beyond the self:

Don’t end up with Phototherapy but with the crisis (Public/ Private) work. I would hate to be known as only having worked on Subjectivity and not given a fuck about anyone else.

Hopefully, we can still use her as an inspiration to go beyond mere mindfulness into an engagement with social and psychological well-being. We certainly need it, and we might even find a deeper mindfulness at the end.

2

I have been thinking about Spence this week after receiving a copy of the new book, Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings, which transcribes hours of interviews with her.

So, while I was delighted to see last week’s post about Greenock linked to by The Glasgow Bell, it was slightly unsettling to be labelled as “Glasgow’s premier flâneur”. Had The Bell painted a target on my back?

Fortunately, no one I spoke to had even heard of the word flâneur. It was like being the West End’s pre-eminent wandervogel or Paisley’s number one peripatetic: I had been saved by obscurity.

But it made me pause: am I a flâneur? And, if so, what does that entail? The definition that pops up on Google is: “a man who saunters around observing society.” This sounds about right, although I am usually rushing around rather than sauntering.

A more poetic description of the flâneur can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s essay, The Painter of Modern Life:

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world [… ] the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.

Yes! This is the thrill of modernity, of being part of the crowd yet still able to observe patterns amid the chaos.1

In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag aligns the flâneur with the street photographer, who is:

an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world “picturesque.”

It’s a seductive passage, but one that better fits the decadent excesses of seventies New York than modern Britain.

Last weekend, I was in England visiting family and found myself playing pool in an industrial estate.

Rather than the urban life, I was drawn to take photos of bales of popcorn at the cinema before seeing Hamnet.2

We arranged our train bookings so that we could spend an hour in Birmingham, whose modern towers were shrouded in mist.

The centre of Birmingham has been transformed with flashy new developments.

It seems a shame that almost all the sculptural brutalist buildings and fittings are being replaced by vulgar bling.

Next to the gilded library is a gilded statue of Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and William Murdoch. It’s really vulgar … almost Trumpian.

When in Birmingham, I always take the opportunity to visit The Ikon Gallery, one of the best contemporary art spaces in Britain.

Their current exhibition is a retrospective of Donald Locke (1930-2010), a Guyanese sculptor whose maximalist paintings employ photography in a stark, expressive way.

Locke shows what happens when an artist wrestles with identity in their work. As Eddy Frankel writes:

Amazingly, Locke, who died in 2010, at first rejected any political reading of the works, insisting they were just exercises in form. It wasn’t until years later that he realised how overburdened with the pain of colonialism the works really were.

Part of the reason I resist identity politics is that I find it impossible think of myself in terms of labels. This is the privilege of one who hasn’t had a label assigned to them. However, now that I have been assigned a label—the flâneur—I begin to understand how it could induce self-consciousness.

While on the train down to England, I compiled what will hopefully become the definitive timeline of the controversial artist Sophie Calle:

1

The subject of Baudelaire’s essay was the painter Constantin Guys, who is described as having an “aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur”:

He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory.

The French artist, Sophie Calle, has done many questionable things in her career:

• She invited people to sleep in her bed while she took photos of them.

• She pursued a stranger to Venice and documented his movements around the city.

• She got a job as a chambermaid in a hotel and took photos of the occupants’ private possessions.

• She found an address book on the street and contacted the people who were listed in it to learn more about the owner.

The title of a recent retrospective, Overshare, made the connection with her projects and the excesses of social media, but this seems slightly off. Her work has always been rigorously conceptual in nature. She never posts random photos online.

Since 1978, Calle has been creating rule-based situations which she documents and presents as art. She originally referred to these as “project games” or “private games” but now calls them “rituals”.

Despite playing with themes such as exhibitionism and intimacy, privacy and surveillance, she does so with a sense of mystery. It encourages the reader—this reader, at least—to play detective to see how the fragments of her oeuvre fit together.

What follows is the evidence I have gathered. A scattershot chronology of Calle’s life. It doesn’t contain her exhibition history or bibliography, just the facts of her life with as much precision as possible.

Email me if anything is missing or incorrect.

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Sophie Calle Timeline

1953

• Born on 9 October in Paris to Robert Calle, an art collector and oncologist, and Monique (Rachel) Sindler, a journalist.

1956

• Her parents divorce.

1967-72

• Aged 14, her grandparents advise Calle have plastic surgery to straighten her nose. Two days before the operation, the surgeon commit suicide.

• Joins a Maoist group.

• Travels to Israel1 and stays in the home of a family friend, Dahn Ben-Amotz. It is claimed in a later biography that Ben-Amotz had sex with underage girls and his mother.

• Travels to Lebanon and trains as a fighter with the Fedayeen militants to impress a boyfriend.

• Back in Paris, she joins an underground abortion network.

• Studies sociology under Jean Baudrillard at the University of Nanterre, but drops out after only a few months. Baudrillard marks her papers favourably so her father would pay for her travels.

1972-78

• Travels to the United States and becomes a barmaid.

• Travels to Mexico and works in the fields.

• Travels to Crete and works with fishermen.

• Other jobs include selling vacuums, waitressing, cannabis farming, and working in a circus.

• Travels to Bolinas in California, where she rents a house belonging to a photographer. Borrows his camera and darkroom to make pictures of graves with only “Father,” “Mother,” “Brother,” “Sister,” “First Wife” carved into them.

• Aged 25, she finally knows what she wants to do with her life and tells her father she is going to become a photographer.

1978

• Returns to Paris to live with her father.

• Takes a photography class, but abandons it after one lesson. In the lesson, she goes to the first floor of the Eiffel Tower and takes photos of people.

• Sees work by Duane Michals in her father’s house and is influenced by the combination of text and image.

• To help rediscover Paris after being away so long, Calle decides to follow people.

• She explores the derelict Grand Hôtel Palais d’Orsay and spends her days in the abandoned room 501. She takes photos and gathers documents from customer files.

1979

• Calle follows a man (Henri B.) in Paris. She meets him later at an art opening, where he mentions a trip to Venice. This is the beginning of Suite Vénitienne.

• On 11 February, she follows Henri B. to Venice, surreptitiously documenting his movements for two weeks with photos, texts, maps, and diary entries.

• Over the course of eight days, from 5pm on 1 April until 10am on 9 April 1979, Calle arranged for 27 people to sleep in her bed in eight‑hour shifts while she photographed them.

• The husband of one of the female participants is an art critic. He invites Calle to show The Sleepers in the modern art museum of Paris.

• Calle wears a blonde wig and works as a stripper in the Pigalle district of Paris.

• On 7 October, the tenant who rents her childhood bedroom from her mother set himself on fire. The firemen throw the bed out of the window. It stays in the courtyard of the building for nine days.

• On 9 October, Calle turned 26.

1980

• Fearing a lawsuit, Calle recreates the photographs in Venice with an actor.

• Asks eight strangers in New York’s Bronx to guide her to personally significant places. She documents with portraits and text.​

• Starts collecting all the birthday presents she receives.

1981

• On 8 January, Calle gets into a fight with a fellow stripper and abandons the profession.

• Takes a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel and systematically photographs and describes guests’ possessions and traces in twelve rooms over several months.

• On 16 April, she asks her mother to hire a private detective to follow her for a day. Calle documents her own movements and later compares them with the detective’s report.

1982

• Finds a leather-bound address book on a street in Paris. Rather than hand it straight back, she photocopies it first and then calls the numbers written in it to build up a picture of the man.

1983

• The Address Book project is serialised in the French newspaper Libération. Despite being pseudonymised, the man threatens to sue.

• On 30 November, she spends the night in a wedding dress with a man she had long admired.

1984

• On 25 October, Calle travels to Japan via Delhi for a residency. She planned to meet up with her boyfriend there, but he never arrives. He subsequently breaks up with her on the phone.

1985

• Calle returns heartbroken to Paris on 28 January and asks friends about the worst pain they have ever suffered.

• Her father arranges for her to see a doctor for her bad breath. It turns out that the man is not a doctor but a psychoanalyst.

1986

• Calle interviews blind people ( Les Aveugles) and asks them to describe their image of beauty.

I am going to insert a paywall now. Partly this is to encourage readers to support The Crop, but also because most of her work emerges from her early years.

If you don’t want to subscribe but desperately want to read, do email me with your most important year and why it is important. I will then send you the rest.

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Not really. But when you search for “Greenock”, the top autocomplete suggestion is: “is greenock rough”. It’s true that, like many towns in Scotland, Greenock has seen better days. Much better days.

2. How did Greenock become wealthy?

Greenock’s port was well-placed to take advantage of the transatlantic triangular trade. Ships went to Africa with guns and textiles, then to the Caribbean with captured Africans to work on the plantations, and finally back to Europe with sugar and tobacco. This trade brought wealth and helped build the town’s huge Italianate municipal building with its ornate sculptural details.

3. What’s there now?

There is still an active port and a terminal where cruise liners dock, but this is not the thriving town it once was.

4. What happened?

Apart from shifting trade patterns, the other cause was the effects of deindustrialisation as shipbuilding left Greenock. All that’s left to remember the industry is a public sculpture by Jason Orr which was recently vandalised.

5. What happened to the post-war redevelopment?

Like Glasgow, Greenock tried to modernise by expanding the roads through the town. It was not a success. The result is an alienating urban experience negotiated via underpasses.

6. So, it’s rough around the edges?

Yes. The population continues to decline, down by 2.7% in the ten years since the last census. People are unhealthier than in the rest of Scotland. Graffiti is not as bad as in Glasgow, but the messages are more pointed.

7. What about signs of hope?

Well, there is a beautiful esplanade, which holds a Parkrun every Saturday …

8. What’s a Parkrun?

A volunteer-led 5k run every Saturday morning. I was in Greenock because all the Parkruns in Glasgow had been called off due to ice. Thanks to the briny water and the temperate maritime climate, they rarely have to cancel.

9. Are there any museums?

Yes! The most interesting new addition is The Wyllieum, a gallery celebrating the artist George Wyllie (1921–2012).

10. George Wyllie?

George Wyllie was an engineer, who joined the navy in the second world war (visiting Hiroshima after it was bombed), but spent a large part of his life working as a customs officer in Greenock.

He liked making things, but it wasn’t until his was in his forties that he became an artist, having visited an exhibition of arte povera at the Kelvingrove. He thought to himself, “I can do that”, and started sculpting.

Wyllie was taken under the wing of cultural entrepreneur Richard Demarco, who introduced him to Joseph Beuys. Wyllie described himself as a “scul?tor”—he had a thing about question marks—and believed that the artist’s role is to ask awkward questions.

Like Beuys, his work is “social sculpture”, most notably in his life-sized straw locomotive that was hung from a crane and later set on fire to reveal a question mark.

Learn more about Wyllie in ’s article from 2021.

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I had never met an Oxfordian before and was curious about their motivation. It seems such an outlandish theory, particularly as de Vere died in 1604, long before Shakespeare’s final works. But the Oxfordians dismiss these concerns. What matters to them is that the details of de Vere’s life have echoes in the plays.

For Oxfordians, it is impossible that a commoner could have had knowledge of distant lands and high court intrigue. In this, they resemble the Young Adult fiction community, who seek to cancel any author who hasn’t directly experienced the thing they write about. Neither the Oxfordians nor the YA think of the artwork as something that can be enjoyed without referring back to the author; biography is absolute.

I tend towards the opposite view. The work comes first, the biography a distant second. I don’t care about gossip. Similarly, I can condemn the life of an immoral artist (e.g. Pablo Picasso, Eric Gill, or Michael Jackson) and still enjoy their work. And yet …

And yet, if the pieces are good, paying attention to the artist and their context becomes a way of honouring them. We are compelled to devote time to that which we love. Also, perhaps there are other lessons to be learned in their life.

Peter Hujar’s photography was my great discovery of last year. In his body of work, Hujar achieved levels of formal mastery and psychological insight that are unrivalled.

And his life is fascinating. He lived in downtown New York at a time when bohemians could still afford to experiment; he died of AIDS; he hung out with Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, William Burroughs, and Nan Goldin. He dated Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz. All of this is culturally resonant and features prominently in the photographs.

Yet it is only because the images are so mysteriously vital that I care at all. Indeed, I cared enough to interview Hujar’s biographer, John Douglas Millar. And I cared enough to read Linda Rosenkrantz’s book Peter Hujar’s Day (2021) and watch Ira Sachs’ adaptation, which came to Glasgow this week.

Rosenkrantz’s book is remarkably slim: 27 pages of an interview plus Stephen Koch’s brief introduction. Even so, there is much to be gleaned about how Hujar saw the world, his working practices, and with whom he associated.

The key event of the day was an assignment to photograph the beat poet Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times. Hujar describes Ginsberg as living in a run-down neighbourhood, endlessly chanting his mantras. However, Sachs never shows us any of this directly. All we ever see in the film is Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) talking in her apartment. In this, the film is too respectful of the source material.

I longed for Sachs to show the life that Hujar describes in the interview or the photographs that he made. It would be a lot more fun. It is telling that the only heartstoppingly beautiful moment is when the characters are static, and the film reaches towards the condition of Hujar’s photography.

Coincidentally, the editor of Peter Hujar’s Day, Affonso Gonçalves, also edited Hamnet (2025), the new film by Chloé Zhao, which shows the biographical events that inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. Presumably, the Oxfordians will boycott it as another instance of Stratfordian propaganda, but I am keen to watch. You never know, it might even inspire me to re-read the play.

The Week in Photos (3-9 Jan 2026)

A selection of photos from the past week. Welcome to all those who have joined after the move from Instagram.

Links

1. This week, I posted my interview with Laura Carreira from last February. Carreira won a Scottish BAFTA for On Falling and was subsequently named the hottest person in Scottish culture by The List.

2. I enjoyed reading ’ essay on context and ignorance when judging a photograph, which partly inspired my piece. Molders complains that our focus on Francesca Woodman’s suicide or Vivian Maier’s life as a nanny means we ignore the work itself.

3. conveys the joy of being clueless at the Pyramids.

4. The Oxfordian I was speaking to was Duncan McLaren, who is a biographer of Evelyn Waugh and Enid Blyton. His current obsession is On Kawara.

5. Incidentally, the most prominent Substackers I’ve seen discuss the topic of Shakespeare’s authorship are, on the Oxford side, monarchy fanboy, , and on the Stratford side, the literary critic, .

6. writes about Edinburgh surrealism and life in a freezing flat.

7. delivers an ode to the Tuk-Tuk.

8. photographs a delightfully inauthentic Polish celebration of Epiphany.

Whenever Hollywood studios want to reboot a superhero franchise, they invariably retell the character’s origin story. A bite from a radioactive spider, the destruction of the home planet, both parents murdered in a dark alley … such events are part of their DNA, their raison d’être.

At the end of 2024, I retired my weekly photojournal, The WIP, to focus on documenting The Golden Z. I wanted to be more intentional with my photography. My theory was that, while we find pleasure in individual images, there is often a higher order of meaning in a sequence.

However, an origin story rarely comes from good intentions. An origin story is also a fatal flaw, an Achilles’ heel.

In my case, the origin story of The WIP ensues from my ambivalence to algorithmic social media, especially Instagram.

We know the arguments against Instagram by now:

• It is incredibly addictive.

• Frequent use leads to distress and anxiety.

• It is a leading source of misinformation and disinformation.

• Meta tracks/sells huge amounts of your personal data to advertisers.

I was prepared to put up with all of this because there are people I like on the platform. But Instagram is now almost entirely focused on short-form, brain-rot video.1 I’m out2 … and reviving The WIP.

The WIP is my attempt to solve the problem of social media: how to stay current without being lost in ephemera. It will be a quick, light read—the week in photos and my work in progress—that links off to longer pieces on The Crop.

This week, for instance, I wrote about the best books I read in 2025 and my ten favourite films.

The topic of origin stories was on my mind after visiting The Well, a new mosaic that entices viewers to look down into the place where Glasgow was born. It’s tricky to capture the sense of depth, so I made a video throwing a coin into the well:

Otherwise, I have been enjoying the lull between Christmas and New Year. I checked out the weird Bonnie Blue aesthetics of the fun fair.

I cleansed myself of this experience by walking around the Necropolis. Saying hello to the industrialist Charles Tennant, a man who built an empire by finding a better way of bleaching cloth. His notable descendants include the Bright Young Thing, Stephen Tennant, among many others.

After spending Christmas with my in-laws in Spain, I got back to Glasgow and took a final walk along The Golden Z in 2025. At the start of the year, my photography was distant and alienated from my subjects. By the end, I felt just about comfortable engaging with them.

Earlier in the day, after seeing a photo of him with Stephen Fry, I had been wondering why Michael Pedersen is not more famous. He is one of the best-connected writers in Scotland, getting blurbs from Alan Cumming and hosting events with Shirley Manson and Nicola Sturgeon.

And then, quite by chance, I saw him on Sauchiehall Street and said hello. We had a lovely chat about Oscar Wilde, being a cat, and the extent to which morality influences our view of artists.

He is a thoughtful, funny man who looks you deep in the eye when having a conversation. I asked if I could take his photos as part of my Golden Z project, and he kindly consented. However, I found it difficult to capture the person I had met rather than the flamboyant public persona. The double exposure above is an attempt to show the two aspects.

One person who has been ever-present during my Golden Z project is Muyiwa Olawumi, a busker who is almost always to be found on Buchanan Street. Originally from Nigeria, he plays music for a church in the East End of Glasgow, and is constantly changing his busking set-up, going from traditional African drums to karaoke from a laptop.

Finally, wishing you all a very happy New Year. Here’s me on 1 January taking a plunge into the icy waters of 2026.

1

When you download the app, the subtitle is “Videos, creators & friends”. Photography is gone.

It’s not that I don’t experience pleasure, more that I never see books as an end in themselves. I read to think, learn, and apply what I’ve learned to my own projects.

More troublingly, I read very little fiction this year. When I did so, I consumed it incredibly slowly. I have been enjoying The Names by Don DeLillo for months now. Savouring the language, not wanting to rush.2

Here are the five photobooks and five non-fiction books that stood out.3

Five Best Photobooks

1. Life is Good & Good for You in New York (1956) by William Klein

Buying new photobooks is an expensive habit. Then, when they go out of print, they become mindbogglingly pricey. Fortunately, I have a library card at the Glasgow School of Art. While they don’t have an original copy of this classic (which sells for over £6,000), they do have the facsimile edition (itself now going for £95) to put the book in context.

Klein’s photos are an explosion of graphic design and kinetic photography. It does what a great photobook should do and becomes exponential as a sequence, with each spread adding to the next.

2. The Non-Conformists (2013) by Martin Parr

In 1975, shortly after he graduated from university, Parr made these photographs of small village congregations around Hebden Bridge. A few of the images appeared in Bad Weather, but the full collection was only published in 2013.

Although in black and white, the humour of his later, more famous, colour work is still present. The sad tragedy at the end of the book is hearing that the ageing parishioners wanted Martin and his wife, Susie, to take over from them. But he was always and only there to document their strange ways for posterity.

3. W. Eugene Smith: Camera as Conscience

W. Eugene Smith was the master of the photo-essay. This definitive collection of his work shows how ethics and aesthetics can be combined in great documentary photography.

The most poignant section is the mockups for the epic book that Smith wanted to complete. He hoped to make a photographic equivalent of Ulysses. Sadly, he ended up rearranging the images for twenty years. A reminder that it is always better to finish work imperfectly than never finish it at all.

4. The Fish That Never Swam (2021) by Kirsty MacKay

Back in January of this year, the University of Glasgow invited to be part of their Creative Conversation series. It is rare for a photographer to be featured in what is usually a literary event.

At the talk, Mackay mentioned that she was uncomfortable with how expensive and elitist photobooks were. She wanted to make a book that was priced more accessibly for the working-class communities that she documents. Nevertheless, The Fish That Never Swam and her recent book The Magic Money Tree are brilliant examples of what can be done with the form.

There is so much attention to detail in the execution. It brings to life a report from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health about the Glasgow Effect, with the stories and photos that she (and a couple of others) took. With W. Eugene Smith, the ethics feel distant. With McKay, I am confronted with the city I live in, and it made me totally reassess my own photographic practice.

5. The Sleepers (2025) by Sophie Calle

While Sophie Calle’s first photography project was made in 1979, it was only published as a book in English this year. It combines interviews with various strangers and intimates, alongside photographs of people sleeping (or pretending to sleep). The project feels disturbing and transgressive, particularly after the trial of Dominique Pelicot, but one can’t help but read on.

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Five Best Non-Fiction Books

1. The Shock of the New (2nd edition, 1991) by Robert Hughes

As an autodidact, my sense of art history is fragmentary at best. With The Shock of the New, I felt the thrill of seeing twentieth-century art turned into a dramatic narrative. Technology, war, theosophy, egotism—it’s all there in this brilliantly written book derived from a television series.

2. Against the Machine (2025) by Paul Kingsnorth

For , both right-wing neoliberal economics and left-wing identity politics have served the same purpose: to sever the roots that kept people connected to the earth and each other. He describes a world hurtling towards a state of total alienation and spiritual poverty. Informed by figures like Simone Weil and Jacques Ellul, it is a gleeful jeremiad against technological and ideological “progress”.

3. Strangers and Intimates (2025) by Tiffany Jenkins

This is an absorbing account of the rise and fall of private lives and the public sphere. It condenses an extraordinary amount of historical material into a relatively small space. It was so good that after finishing the audiobook, I immediately picked up a physical copy.

4. Zona (2012) by Geoff Dyer

I read five books by Geoff Dyer this year—five!—including his excellent new memoir, Homework, but Zona, his book on Tarkovsky’s Stalker, was my favourite. To make such a tortured film into a hilarious book demonstrates the agility of Dyer’s mind. Wit is key to intelligence, and here it allows us a sense of cosmic irony in Stalker.

5. Diary At the Centre of the Earth. Vol. 1 1997-2007 (2025) by Dickon Edwards

I want to see a review of this book from someone who knows nothing of . What do they make of it? What do they make of him? There is plenty of London colour from the turn of the millennium for it to work as history, but he is also a unique character.

I was around for a few of the later years described (indeed, my interview with Dickon is part of the book’s appendices). But reading it sank me into a three-day existential funk. It muddied my psychical waters by dredging up past lives. This feeling is especially acute with Dickon because he is at pains to be a particular version of himself.

Next year, I vow to read more novels and more poetry. Recommendations in the comments, please!

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10. If I Had Four Dromedaries (Chris Marker, 1966)

One of my dreams is to make a film composed entirely of still images. Chris Marker—best known for La Jeteé, the short, still-image movie that inspired 12 Monkeys—provides the perfect template here.

9. Game (John Minton, 2025)

Thrilling high-concept rave-era drama about a guy who has been in a car crash and is then taunted by a poacher (Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods) in a wood. Produced and soundtracked by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow for a measly £250k, it deserves to be picked up for proper release.

8. The Mahabharata (Peter Brook, 1989)

We watched this epic in a hip Neapolitan cinema after a long day of travelling. My wife, , is a Sanskrit scholar and knows the mythological background. I was just happy to enjoy hearing the stories told for the first time.

7. I am not your negro (Raoul Peck, 2016)

Remarkable biopic of a remarkable man. James Baldwin is the Quentin Crisp of black men: witty, dandiacal, waspish, cultured. I also enjoyed watching some of Peck’s other films, The Young Karl Marx and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.

6. Barcelona (Whit Stillman, 1994)

A few months ago, I saw Whit Stillman in person at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh and enjoyed the muddy 35mm screening of his debut movie, Metropolitan, but we had more fun watching Barcelona. Wonderfully witty.

5. Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro, 2025)

Low expectations always help. And I enjoyed this baroque movie set partly in Edinburgh. Begins ludicrously, but develops into something quite enchanting.

4. I Know Where I’m Going (Powell and Pressburger, 1945)

A year without Powell and Pressburger would be sad indeed. This fantasy romance was the most charming film I saw in 2025.

3. The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)

One of the most thrilling films I’ve seen for a long time. It is politically incorrect, grubby, wayward—everything that the AI aesthetic of our era is incapable of being.

2. All the President’s Men (Alan J Pakula, 1976)

With the death of Robert Redford, we looked for a film to honour him by watching. This seemed the obvious choice, especially as it is the third in Pakula’s peerless conspiracy trilogy (the others are Klute and The Parallax View). It is the most consistently brilliant of the three.

1. Shifty (Adam Curtis, 2025)

My wife tells me that this is not a film but television. However, I think we would better appreciate TV if we saw shows as unbearably long movies. Awesome footage, bonkers narrative. Lots to chew on, lots to ponder. The overall message, that the current politicians are lost and that change is coming, is strong.

Memorability is intensely personal and awkward to fit into a system of aesthetic standards, but it provides an excellent foundation for creating end-of-year review lists like this one.

And so, rather than compile a hierarchical top ten, I’ve separated works into increasingly whimsical categories to help explain what made them memorable to me.

Best Exhibition

Peter Hujar — Eyes Open in the Dark

It sometimes feels like few in the art world care about beauty. Their hearts have hardened, their spirits are weak. For many, art is simply a vehicle for social change rather than a source of aesthetic bliss. So when an exhibition comes along that is devastatingly beautiful—in all its abject, tender, and spiritual forms—it is all the more shocking.

Peter Hujar’s pictures are alive. The prints—both Hujar’s originals and the recent ones by co-curator Gary Schneider—possess a powerful aura that allows them to transcend their time while also being essential documents of the era. I am even tempted to make a pilgrimage to Bonn next year to see the show a third time.

Read my interview with the exhibition’s co-curator, and Peter Hujar’s biographer, John Douglas Millar.

Most Ambitious Exhibition

Wolfgang Tillmans — Nothing could have prepared us, Everything could have prepared us

Before the Pompidou closed for five years of renovation, Wolfgang Tillmans took over an entire floor of the library — including the photocopiers, the ageing fire alarms, and the terrible coffee machine — for a kaleidoscopic greatest hits package. His prints are sometimes casual—pinned simply to the wall—at other times they are formal. He works with magazines, but is equally at home in a fine art context. In Paris, it all served to highlight the possibilities of photography.

Although I am sceptical about Tillmans—particularly his awful music and inept attempts to fix liberal politics—his photography remains vital. No one better shows the delights of practical liberalism.

Best Live Art Performance

Berger & Wirz — LIVE @ White Cart Water

On a chilly night in March, Josh Wirz put on a wetsuit and lay in a rubberised orange cage in White Cart while live-streaming for an hour. Up on the bridge above, David Hicks (standing in for Axel Berger due to illness) spoke as if appearing on a rolling news report.

In the crowd’s reaction and the sense of peril, it was a brilliant piece of performance art, which I have been thinking about all year. Check out my series of photos to see more of the performance.

Best Artist Talk

Mark Leckey at Strangefield

All I really knew about Mark Leckey before attending his talk was that he had won the Turner Prize and that a friend loved his breakthrough work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

In his talk, Leckey described coming of age in the Acid House era and how he wanted to make art that evoked similar feelings of ecstasy. This has been spectacularly achieved in recent video works, Carry Me into the Wilderness and To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body), where Leckey approaches a religious epiphany. A similar moment of sublimity can be seen in his current Guggenheim Bilbao installation.

Most Instagrammable Exhibition

Ugo Rondinone — the rainbow body at Sadie Coles HQ

In Claire Bishop’s latest book, Disordered Attention, she makes the point that, whether we like it or not, the phone is now a part of our aesthetic lives. Rather than see it as purely negative, she makes the case that we use it to commune with others and discuss ideas.

This extravagantly colourful exhibition by Ugo Rondinone seemed designed for maximum social media engagement. The moulded figures looked melancholy and bored, probably because they had no phone to doom-scroll on.

Most Welcome Magazine Revival

Variant Magazine

A couple of years ago, I picked up a few books from the late Leigh French’s library. The donation I made went towards the production of a one-off relaunch of Variant magazine to honour French’s contribution to culture.

And what a superb job Ben, Neil and John did editing it. My favourite was Paul Pieroni’s article on Daniel Buren’s bollards for the Glasgow Garden Festival, which is the kind of connection between social history and art that makes my world—and my daily walks—come alive.

Most Steps Walked to Experience the Sublime

Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii

Before I went to Naples, I did a little research and learned that one could avoid the crowds that overwhelm Pompeii and simply visit Herculaneum, which is a more modest and better-preserved archaeological site. Thankfully, the hotel staff said that this was wrong and that we must visit Pompeii.

At the end of a long, hot day walking in its ruins, we found ourselves in the Villa of the Mysteries, where we were enchanted by a well-preserved fresco devoted to a Dionysian cult.

Most Frenetic Tour Experience

The Vatican Museum Tour

Thanks to Italy’s superb railway system, one can easily do a day trip to Rome from Naples. I have always wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, but seemingly the only way of gaining access is to take a pre-booked tour. What this means in practice is to jostle amongst the dozens of other tours for a rushed overview of the most notable works. Yet, even this compromised experience was sublime, so incredible is the collection.

Most Intense Book Event

Tony Tulathimutte’s book Rejection did what I thought was impossible and depicted phone consciousness in literature. The squalid mind of the scroller, the pettiness of texting, post-Tinder dating horror show, it’s all grimly detailed in his collection of linked stories.

On his UK book tour, the peerless Alasdair Gray Archive got Tony to talk with Elle Nash about Rejection (the scabrous Ahegao) and then with Rodge Glass about Alasdair Gray’s sickly erotic novel, 1982, Janine.

Best Drinks at an Opening

A mention must be made of Fraser Kerr’s debut exhibition ‘DOMI DEMO DE NOVO’ at The Little Art Factory in Kilmarnock. I went to it because Fraser is a great guy, a superb activist photographer, and because I would like to do my own exhibition at some point and was curious how he would arrange the photos. In his recap of lessons learned, he mentions spending £120 on whisky for the opening, which may not have made financial sense but definitely made the event memorable. Check out his zine of the show.

Most Glasgow Miracle Experience

Never Go Out at SWG3

Never Go Out was ostensibly a fundraiser for Marissa Keating’s forthcoming film about GSA’s famous Sculpture and Environmental Art course, but the main effect was to revive the notion—in my mind, at least—that there is something magical in the soil that keeps Glasgow relevant.

The night featured bands like The Tenementals and Saint Sappho, advice from people like Sam Ainsley and Alan Dimmick, DJ sets from Optimo (Espacio), and art from recent graduates.

One of the main reasons I wanted to attend Never Go Out was to see the band Nurse for the second time. They are a doomy Joy Division-ish electro band whose music has urgency and intensity. They also have no social media and no Bandcamp, which only adds to the charm.

The paradox of memorability is that almost anything can stick in the mind if you dedicate enough attention. Even the act of photographing an event helps solidify it in one’s mental archive. It is no coincidence that half of the things I’ve listed here were ones I documented. So be it. What we pay attention to is what makes up a life. Here’s to more memorable cultural experiences in 2026.

Despite the year having 27 days left to go, we have collectively decided that December doesn’t count.1 It’s Spotify Unwrapped season, and friends on Instagram have been either sharing why Spotify is evil or their favourite tracks.

Thankfully, I don’t need to worry about alienating either side because my streaming tastes are far too embarrassing to be divulged. Instead, I have curated a list of interesting tracks that represent my year. Enjoy!

✡️ January

January is a good time for getting cosy and watching movies. I was underwhelmed by Nosferatu and The Brutalist in the cinema, but had a good time watching Heretic at home. I particularly enjoyed the mini-TED talk that Hugh Grant gives comparing religions to songs and kept coming back to The Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe, which is the template—the Judaism—for Radiohead’s Creep (Christianity) and Lana Del Ray’s Get Free (Islam).

👨‍🎤 February

I visited London in February for the first time in years and had a great time seeing it with fresh eyes. It allowed me to be a tourist and do things like visit the place where the cover of Ziggy Stardust was shot. My favourite song on the album is still the first song.

🎻 March

Tindersticks came to Glasgow in March and delivered a sublime set of melancholy songs.

💋 April

Ahead of seeing talk about John Lennon and Paul McCartney (check out his playlist), I revisited The Beatles for an entire month. Here is a demo, included by Leslie, that led to the band being rejected by Decca.

📺 May

A new Adam Curtis documentary is always a treat, not least for the soundtrack, and Shifty was a brilliant return to form. Here is a classic theme tune to an old TV show (Vendetta) and Curtis’s The Mayfair Set.

💄 June

I didn’t see Oasis in 2025, but I did catch Morrissey and Pulp. While Morrissey’s songs are still great, and it was incredible to hear How Soon is Now live, the atmosphere at the gig was less fun. Both Pulp’s fans and set were exuberant.

🏛️ July

I have been listening to more classical music this year and particularly enjoyed a playlist that a fan made for Lindyman.

🎤 August

I generally prefer audiobooks to podcasts, which are too ephemeral, too slapdash. This year, I particularly enjoyed by Tiffany Jenkins. Alas, Spotify only gives users 15 hours of audiobooks a month. When this happens, you can listen to albums of stand-up comedy. There’s a lot of Stewart Lee and Norm MacDonald on there.

🍝 September

Unfortunately, I missed ’s Charles Mingus listening session during Govanhill Festival, but did greatly enjoy listening to the album itself.

🦒 October

My interest in Geoff Dyer led to me to see him in Edinburgh back in June. His new book is good on bands like Hawkwind, but it is his avant-garde improvised jazz recommendations that I enjoyed most. The Necks’ new triple album, Disquiet, is mesmerising.

🚘 November

One of my favourite genres of music is what we might call Ballardian driving music. I didn’t drive much in 2025, but when I did I listened to this Atrocity Exhibition playlist, which includes interviews with James Dean, speeches by JFK, recordings of Freud, and music by people like Steve Reich:

🐦‍⬛ December

The month has barely begun. Who knows what we’ll discover in the next few weeks? But I did have a great time watching Game (John Minton, 2025), a new film set in the rave era produced by Geoff Barrow from Portishead and starring Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods.

🎧 Bonus

One of the few podcasts that I regularly listen to is and I was thrilled to be a guest last week:

Strange Exiles

Episode 43: Neil Scott - Unaltered Images

My guest is Neil Scott, a photographer, writer and designer who has written for The Glasgow Bell, Recessed Space, OutsideLeft, and Crumble Magazine among other places…

Listen now

4 months ago · 3 likes · Bram E. Gieben and Neil Scott

The day started with me getting the 6:31 train to Stranraer via Ayr.

Alas, our train was delayed by two minutes, which meant that our connecting train left just as we arrived. Four of us were stranded in Ayr.

Ordinarily, I would have given up at this point and got the next train home. However, one resourceful traveller called the station’s help point and managed to secure us a free taxi to Stranraer.

The principal characters were:

Craig (early 20s, sharp suit): heading to an interview at Morrisons supermarket.

Mark (late 40s, mysterious): leafletting for a cause he wouldn’t name.

Lily (late 20s, middle-class English woman): representing a London-based eco charity that provides grants for home insulation.

And me? I was there to finally run Stranraer’s parkrun.

It felt like the beginning of a play, maybe Huis Clos. Were we a set of strangers fated to spend eternity together?

There was also Robert, our taxi driver, who told us he was just about to retire to a village outside of Bangkok. He’d had enough of Scottish weather.

“Ye ken?”

I kenned.

The five of us chatted about insulation and the damp problems that had been in the news. We then talked about where we were from. And, lacking much else to discuss, Craig asked if anyone had seen anything good on TV.

Sadly, with the abundance of channels and streaming services, we couldn’t find one single programme that we had all watched. Where, oh where, can we find the universal in such an individualistic age?

Lily needed to be dropped off in Barrhill, which added a delay. But I thought I could still make the parkrun in time.

Disaster struck seven minutes from Stranraer. Craig looked pale and said, “I feel sick.”

The taxi driver opened the window and, almost instantly, Craig poked his head out and vomited. Sick all over the back window and a bit on Mark’s face.

Robert shouted, “Why didn’t you tell us you felt sick?!”

“I’m so sorry!” He replied. “It never happened before. I thought I could hold on.”

Robert stopped the car, retrieved the cleaning equipment from the boot, and told Craig to get to work. Mark, meanwhile, was examining himself for flecks of vomit.

Personally, I was just hoping I’d make it to the parkrun in time. It was a long way to go to miss it. And, after the car was clean and Robert dropped us off in Stranraer, I did make it. A mere ten minutes late.

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From the hip

The story above contains photos “shot from the hip”. That is, they are all photos taken without looking through a viewfinder.

I also use a wallet case with my iPhone and can take photos without the screen being visible. Furthermore, there is even a button on the iPhone that opens the camera app and takes a photo without having to look at the screen at all.

My goal is to make the camera an extension of myself; I want to know the technology so intimately that I can envision and execute the shot without needing to fuss over the device.

Most of the time, these photos are terrible, but the method can help you to document situations where clearly bringing out the camera would change the mood.

It adds another layer to the debate over photography ethics. At least with a visible camera, the person can object. Shooting from the hip, especially with a hidden camera, can feel creepy. I justify it to myself by claiming that I am documenting reality as it is, but who am I to override the will of others?

When called out on “shooting from the hip”, a journalist friend suggested that I could try to gain consent retrospectively. I squirmed, realising the extent to which I would have to question both my ethics and aesthetics.1

As photography becomes a popular hobby, as cameras get ever smaller— to the point of being embedded in glasses—the question of consent and legality will get ever more pressing. Are you ready for the conversation?

Later on, as a fan of anti-celebrities like Kurt Cobain, this idea returned. Maybe the reason normal pop stars were so banal was because the constant attention of cameras had sucked out their soul.2

Nowadays I know that, while a photo doesn’t steal the soul, it can do strange things to people’s sense of self. The still image induces self-consciousness, as if by storing all those frozen moments we become less embodied in the present.

It doesn’t help that the language of photographers is so brutal. Thomas Joshua Cooper sums it up well:

The idea of “taking” is anathema to me […] Taking things, taking pictures, shooting, Jesus, what a vulgar, vulgar idea. When I was young, I was a shooter. In my family, guns were part of the deal: first rifle at six years old, for a shotgun, eight years old, first range rifle, 12 years old. You learn how to shoot things and it has a particular meaning for me. Just like taking things, you take something and all of a sudden whatever you’ve taken is gone. You shoot something and whatever you’ve shot is dead.

I have come to think that most street photographers are vampires, preying on the emotions of others for nourishment in the form of clout. When I’ve taken such photos I always told myself that I am documenting the world, understanding my place within it, watching and observing; I hope that what I make is beautiful. But I can’t help feeling that it is not a mutually beneficial exchange. What’s in it for the subject?

One compromise is to only take photos of people who are consciously on display at things like Pride marches and political protests. Similarly, when authors are on tour promoting their books at events it seems reasonable to take a subtle snapshot. On such occasions, I want to commune with the aura of those whose work means a lot to me, but I am also a kind of cheerleader who wants to spread the word on social media.3

What follows is a series of portraits of writers and artists from events. They are an aide memoire that says “I woz there”. They are also a way of connecting with the writers. I hope they are not extractive, but it’s Hallowe’en and I am happy to be, for one day at least, The Vampire Cheerleader.

Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, came to the University of Glasgow on 21 October to talk about her new book. She walked around the room whilst answering questions coming right up next to me.

I was in the front row in a small bookshop so struggled to get long-limbed Geoff Dyer into the frame. He has been my reading obsession this year and didn’t disappoint.

This photo of the writers Tony Tulathimutte, Rodge Glass, and was posed after their event at the Alasdair Gray Archive. I did that thing that photographers do and told them not to smile; this was from the moment just before they composed themselves.

I was aware of Andrew O’Hagan’s range of intelligence from his journalism in the LRB, but in person he had a rare sharpness.

Irvine Welsh comes across as sympathetic in the new documentary about him, but I was struck by his laddish manspreading demeanour.4

Experimental poet, Christian Bök, here lamenting the knockbacks he has received from the literary establishment.

Colin Drysdale, author of Glasgow Uncovered and the man behind the popular This is My Glasgow social media account. I was sitting far too close.

Polari Koi patiently listening to a question after his talk about self-control.

was clearly suffering a cold on his Beatles book tour, but managed to make it through the Glasgow leg.

Whit Stillman looks into the crowd after a screening of Metropolitan.

The artist Martin Creed at a screening of his work in progress.

K Patrick reading at Glasgow Project Room with Adrien Howard.

ahead of his talk about The Expressway World at New Glasgow Society.

Dancer and choreographer, Michael Clark, gives a rare artist talk at University of Glasgow.

Zoe Wicomb, who sadly died on 13 October, with David Bellingham and her husband Roger Palmer.

and Kirsty Logan doing an event together (yet again!) at Mount Florida Books.

Michael Palin and Tom Hodgkinson having fun at the Idler Festival.

4

The film’s director, Paul Sng, liked this one and asked to include it in the Reality is Not Enough press pack.

A few weeks ago, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were overheard on a hot mic discussing how organ replacement might help them achieve immortality. These dictators, much like the billionaire tech bros, covet longevity via gene editing and pharmaceuticals. But what if the answer was simpler? What if the secret to a long life was to just take more photos?

The idea was planted in my mind after reading an interview with Martin Parr where he mentioned that photographers “are known to live to ripe old ages” Whenever I hear a claim like that I instinctively seek evidence for and against. A data point came soon after with the death of Elliott Erwitt aged 95. I remember thinking that this was a good innings, and was inspired to look up other photographers who lived a long time.

It didn’t take long to build up a substantial list:

• André Kertész died at 91

• Irving Penn, Roman Vishniac, and Andreas Feininger were 92

• Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbott, Yousuf Karsh, Edward Steichen, and Gordon Parks all died at 93

• Robert Frank was 94

• Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson got to 95

• William Klein and Alfred Eisenstaedt were 96

• Willy Ronis was 99

• Manuel Álvarez Bravo made it to 100

• Milton Rogovin died at the ripe old age of 102

• And—previously unknown to me—Horacio Coppola tops the list at 105!

That’s quite a few nonagenarians and centenarians. Furthermore, that’s only the ones who are dead. Some of my favourites photographers are still alive and productive well into their eighties and nineties:

• Daidō Moriyama and William Eggleston are 86

• Joel Meyerowitz looks great at 87

• Don McCullin appears vital at 89

• You don’t hear much about Lee Friedlander these days, but he is alive at 91

• And Duane Michals is still working away at 93

Amazing, no?

Is photography some kind of elixir? Should doctors be prescribing cameras on the NHS? Or is it just survivorship bias? That is, do we only pay attention to those who lived long enough to develop a reputation? Maybe it’s too easy to cherry-pick a few prominent figures and create a pattern. What about all the hundreds of photographers who died young or at an average age?1

To get a more objective view, I compiled a spreadsheet from Wikipedia’s List of Photographers page. I removed all living photographers and tabulated the remaining 711 with their approximate age at death. I discovered that the average (mean) age at death was 74. The median age was 77.2 So nothing very spectacular compared to average life expectancy, which in the UK is around 81.

Despite this evidence, I can’t help wondering if there might be something to the idea that photography confers some longevity advantages. So here, with some works by long-lived photographers, are some possible causes.

Five reasons why photographers might live a long time

1. Photographers have a sense of purpose

The challenge of photography never ends. There is no definitive photo, just the next one. Having a sense of purpose in life makes people 28% less likely to develop cognitive problems. Milton Rogovin, for instance, found purpose in documenting the invisible workers. As he said, the rich have their own photographers.

2. Photographers get outside

A lot of photography happens in the fresh air. Photographers are often exposed to the sun, even when others are in the shade. This has numerous benefits.

3. Photographers move around

Most photographers don’t stay in one place. Low-impact exercise, like walking, is correlated with greater life expectancy. For instance, golfers live five years longer on average.

4. Photographers get to meet people

Social interaction is important to health and is linked with a longer lifespan. It is striking that most of the photographers in the list above focus on people.

5. Photographers understand the brevity of life

To Photograph is to Learn How to Die is the poignant title of Tim Carpenter’s essay. We can’t help but notice the impermanence of the photographed life as the people change and things disappear. It helps us cherish life in all its variety. Most people die long before they are buried, as their world narrows down to predictable habits. As advises (and photographers do): embrace the random.

Coda

Of course, all longevity research feels like idle speculation. There are no guarantees. The guru of Ashtanga yoga, Sharath Jois, died on a hike at the age of 53. What made this ironic is that he had recently written a book explaining the “secrets to a long and healthy life.” If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for immortality.