Sadly, Orwell died of tuberculosis at the age of 46, so never got to test the theory on himself. However, the photos we have from a few years earlier (aged around 38) show a man who is curious, alert, yet marked by his experiences.

Although the BBC photographer may have chosen a flattering light, there is little indication that the image has been manipulated. The lines in his face have not been airbrushed away. The eyes retain a spark. It feels truthful.

Compare that to Grok’s colourised version. The skin is glowing and the hair is glossy — it feels slightly off, like a waxwork. Nevertheless, given Orwell’s interest in truth and propaganda, I thought it might be a good image for this week’s post about FaceApp.

FaceApp is an image editing tool for smartphones that allows users to subtly — and not so subtly — process their portraits. The most playful part of the app let you see what you (or George Orwell) would look like bald, as a surfer, or as the other gender, among other presets.

There’s an uncanny quality to these portraits; it’s like encountering a new relative. And it’s all the more magical in that it only takes one tap to totally transform the image.

Viewing the ageing filter is poignant when it’s someone else, but a horrific premonition when it’s yourself. It is therefore unsurprising that most of the app’s functions are about making your face look “better”.

But what is better? People like Clavicular (Braden Peters), an online streamer adjacent to the manosphere known for looksmaxxing, have made profitable careers trying to lay out the criteria.

For Clavicular, self-improvement can mean taking a hammer (or the surgeon’s scalpel) to sculpt the cheekbones, square the jawline, and narrow the nose. And the result is a distinctive look that is more or less achievable — in JPEG format — in FaceApp, as seen below.

The danger in tweaking our self-image via filters is that we end up wanting to recreate it in reality. It has been estimated that the British spend over £3.6bn a year on “aesthetics”. I wonder how much of this is due to the self-fashioning on apps like FaceApp. Have you noticed how modern faces, with their plump collagen-injected lips and smooth foreheads, have begun to look the same?

There’s a tragic vanity to seeing oneself younger and prettier. When the gap between the ideal and reality is too great, it messes with our sense of self. Recall the TikTok trend from a few years ago where middle-aged people would cry after seeing ‘themselves’ through a teenager filter.

In 2017, FaceApp caused controversy after introducing an ethnicity swap feature. This was swiftly removed, but gender swapping is still available, leading some transgender people to debate whether the app causes dysphoria or is affirming.

Beyond the more egregious presets, FaceApp is essentially a Photoshop substitute to make glossy portraits. For anyone who works in marketing or edits headshots for a living, these tools will be a godsend. A few small adjustments, done with taste, could protect the ego of your client and help you keep your job. We are surrounded by photoshopped images of models; why shouldn’t everyone have access to such tools?

Well, there is a quote that is often misattributed to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” That’s basically how I feel about never editing my photos. If I edit, it is to try and bring out the truth, not mask what is imperfect. Integrity is everything.

This is not a sponsored post, but it could have been.

A week ago, a marketing agency got in touch offering me $500 to write about FaceApp. Offers like this are often scams, so I was wary. But I played along, saying that I would do so if I had editorial independence.

They reassured me that I could write whatever I liked; they just wanted to factcheck the piece. But it soon became clear that certain topics were off-limits.

A contract granting them a “worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable […] license […] to utilise Talent’s [me!] performance, name, social media handle, photograph, voice, picture, likeness […] in all forms of Media, whether now existing or later developed” made me feel like I was selling my soul. So I declined their offer and wrote this instead.

Integrity is everything, but I still need to live. If you would like to support The Crop do consider a paid subscription.

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When people asked me what I was doing at the weekend, I told them the same thing: I was going to the wall of death.

Their brows furrowed: what is a wall of death?

Traditionally, I explained, it was a fairground attraction in which daredevils on motorbikes would speed around a wooden cylinder until they were horizontal. But the one in Glasgow is an events space called the Revelator, located near the Barclay Curle Crane, and masterminded by the artist Stephen Skrynka.

Before the wall of death, I had my regular parkrun appointment. Although the nearest parkrun to the Revelator is in Victoria Park, I was running late and cycled to Elder Park in Govan — a few minutes shorter ride away.

Looming over the park is BAE Systems yard — one of the last remnants of Glasgow’s shipbuilding past.

I’d also been wanting to revisit the Clyde Tunnel, the pedestrian/cycle part of which is one of the most dystopian places in Glasgow.

The adjacent road tunnel was greenlit in 1948 when large boats still sailed up the river. Nowadays, it is a shabby sight and has been largely neglected since the 1980s.

From the graffiti, it mainly seems to be used by the local gangs as a message board to inform the world who is a ‘grass’.

Trainer prints adorned the walls like handprints in Cueva de las Manos1.

There were locked doors and gates separating pedestrians from the maintenance shafts.

It was scary the first few times, but quiet on a Saturday morning in May.

And although it was damp, and the paint was peeling, it didn’t feel like it was going to cave in.

As the tunnel continued, I felt like a character from ancient Greek literature who had to take a journey to the underworld.

At the end of the tunnel, there was a barred gate that prevented people from exiting until they had buzzed the control centre. Presumably, this is a way to prevent anti-social behaviour; however, it summoned the vision of being stuck in the tunnel forever.

Emerging into daylight, I saw an instruction not to hate using Mr Happy, a figure who had been used in the famous Glasgow’s Miles Better campaign in the eighties.

The previous night, the Glasgow City Heritage Trust had launched its new exhibition about the revived well at the heart of Glasgow Cathedral. In a vitrine, they displayed some of the things that had been thrown down the well in the previous decades, including a Mr Happy.

I arrived at the wall of death and heard Gordon Gibb lament the neglect of the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building. For Gibb, valuing architecture means preserving things for people to enjoy long after we have gone. I hope that the city can maintain the Clyde Tunnel — perhaps the closest we have in Glasgow to a journey to the underworld — for many years to come.

1

The cave art hand stencils from as far back as 7,300 BC found in Argentina:

The longer I live in Scotland, the more foreign it seems. Don’t get me wrong, I feel at home here … it’s more that I have begun to recognise the subterranean influences at play.

The Act of the Union is barely a scratch on the surface of Scottish history. 300-odd years later, it still has separate legal, educational and religious systems. Yet, more than this, Scotland has a different geological — even geomantical — character.

Apart from the central belt (the stretch between Glasgow and Edinburgh) and a few coastal towns, Scotland is basically empty. Its shallow soil could never support a large population, even if the inhabitants could navigate all the mountains and peninsulas. It is a country where one can be alone.

And this is what I decided to do last Saturday — to be alone … and try to recover my vital spark.1

The area around Lochgilphead is mysterious, full of mossy woodland and ancient inscriptions.

In his book on Scottish identity, Stone Voices, the journalist Neal Ascherson compares the 5,000-year-old cup-and-ring marks to the rock art of Altamira, Namibia or Queensland. They connect with the seasons and the timeless.

Similarly, the standing stones of Nether Largie are imagined as sacred sites, important in the calendar of the Neolithic inhabitants.

It is the perfect place to escape the demands of the modern world … and commune with lichen.2

As someone who mainly takes photos of people, I was curious to see what I was drawn to in their absence.

I’ve been reading Andrew Durbin’s book on Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, which has a passage about Hujar’s empathy with animals:

Those who watched him work invariably spoke of the incredible intimacy he developed with animals, just like when he was a child, how a cow understood Peter as much as Peter understood the cow. His portraits bear out this testimony; whether it’s a dog in his studio or a horse by the side of the road, the animals are fully present personalities, unafraid.

“If you look at those pictures of cows,” Fran Lebowitz said, “they look like people. I don’t look at a cow and see a person, but Peter did.”3

Hujar worked almost exclusively in black-and-white, something I’ve always resisted, but it is easy to see the appeal when in nature surrounded by lurid shades of green.

Monochrome forces you to go back to basics — to focus on composition and meaning. It is a sensitive medium that cultivates sensitivity in the photographer. There is no better place to do so than in deep Scotland.

3

The Peter Hujar archive has a good collection of his cow photos:

Would I consolidate my life or seek out new experiences? Would I tidy up or make a mess? The book I reviewed last week, FASHION by Mark Power, felt like an attempt to leave a legacy; to take all the ephemera of a working life and package it into something monumental. It smelt of mortality.

Earlier in the year, Julian Barnes stated that his latest novel would be his last. He didn’t want to risk dying mid-chapter and having an editor ruin it. For some reviewers, this is exactly what happened with the new Christopher Priest biography of J.G. Ballard, which was finished by Priest’s wife, after his death, as a tribute.

Barnes, Ballard, Priest: these are writers whose work has given me enormous pleasure over the years, yet only one of them is still alive to answer questions. The message is clear: if you want to speak to one of your heroes, you must do so while you still can.

The phrase “don’t meet your heroes” is often taken to mean that those heroes will inevitably disappoint. But in my experience, the biggest danger is you being a disappointment to them. Hopefully, that is not the case with today’s interview with one of my favourite filmmakers, Patrick Keiller.

This time last year, I published a piece about Keiller’s London in rapturous terms, writing:

The first time I saw London was a revelation. It was unlike anything I had seen before. I watched it with the ecstatic pleasure of an obsessive identifying their obsession. In this case, the obsession is psychogeography, that strange alchemy of place, history, and psychology.

Even now, just seeing a brief clip from the film is enough to make the city come alive in my imagination.

Subsequently, I got in touch with Patrick Keiller to see if he would be willing to do an interview, and he kindly agreed to answer my questions via email.

Neil Scott: I have long been fascinated by your work, so it was wonderful when Fuel published a photobook of London. It was interesting to see your BFI Top Ten films and to find News from Home and La Jetée on the list. Could you tell me how you came to make films with a static camera?

Patrick Keiller: The first couple of films I made were 16mm monochrome, short, and photographed with a ‘subjective’ camera, handheld, often walking – something like a clumsy imitation of human vision, perhaps that of a Frankensteinian creature or a poorly constructed robot. The films are very rudimentary and technically fairly inept. In the third film [The End (1986)], there isn’t much walking camera, though there are other camera movements, mostly spontaneous. By the fifth [The Clouds (1989)], I was using longer focal length lenses, and began to use a tripod (to avoid camera shake, more intrusive with long focal length lenses). I’d become more preoccupied with framing.

With the move to 35mm, although I did make some handheld footage, in the finished films the camera is nearly always on a tripod, and nearly always static. There are a few pans in Robinson in Space. The footage is largely of spatial subjects, which tend not to move — framed in rectangular frontal images, within which movement occurs. I was always in pursuit of illusory three-dimensionality, and the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional image depends to a large extent on definition — sharpness. 35mm is potentially much sharper than 16mm, but more likely to lose this quality if one moves the camera. Unfortunately, this preoccupation is a bit beside the point when the films are viewed as standard definition DVDs, but two of them are offered in HD, and hopefully one day Robinson in Space will be too.

Another thing is that, despite the films’ relatively slow pace, we were always in a hurry, having often waited for the right light, the right kind of bus, clouds, wind, etc., and being anxious to move on as soon as possible, whereas moving the camera requires a little planning and takes longer. Instead, I got into the habit of changing the lens, which is why there are so many cuts on axis (all the films were made with prime lenses).

There are, of course, plenty of films in which the camera doesn’t move, so it’s never struck me as particularly unconventional.

You recorded the decline of Britain in the Major years. Yet watching them today is an exercise in nostalgia: no matter how grim things are, they can always get worse. Private equity now owns care homes, water companies, funeral parlours, and student flats ... the Robinson films were extremely prescient about all this. What, if anything, are you nostalgic for from that period?

I’m not sure nostalgic is the right word, but I miss the sense that in making Robinson in Space I’d discovered something. London had more or less confirmed what I already suspected about the city, but the sequel was different. I set out with the idea that Britain was a backward capitalism because it had never had a bourgeois revolution (the Nairn-Anderson thesis), but by the end it seemed rather that, while English capitalism is an unpleasant reality for many of us, on its own terms it is not at all unsuccessful. It was only after I’d made the film that someone alerted me to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, in which she asks ‘Is Britain, then, a peculiar capitalism or is it peculiarly capitalist?’ and argues that it is the latter.

What developments would a fourth Robinson film address?

About twelve years ago, after Verso had published a book of essays that I’d written for various publications between 1997 and 2010, I determined that my next item should be another book.

Julian Barnes recently wrote what he says will be his last novel, explaining that he didn’t want to run the risk of leaving one unfinished. What unfinished projects do you have that you’d still like to finish?

I would like to finish the above. I’d imagined, initially, it would explore the aftermath of 2008, anticipating slow decline, but not the more immediate disasters of the last ten years. I began by trying to discover how, despite a litany of socio-economic and other problems, the UK still manages to sustain a remarkably high level of material prosperity — measured, that is, in conventional terms – and whether it could continue to do so.

In 2025, for example, in a ranking of GNI PPP per capita (Gross National Income per capita adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity), the World Bank placed the UK at number 30, between France (29) and Italy (31), and six places above Japan. Moreover, the UK’s GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, is now about 35 per cent greater than it was in 1997.

What, I wonder, are the material flows underlying such claimed prosperity, which seems so hard to credit, both for the UK and elsewhere – all this in the context of cognitive dissonance with respect to the conflict between the increased consumption that comes with growth and the reality of the climate crisis.

A while back, in Dundee, I stumbled upon a place called The Keiller Centre. It did not, alas, contain academics dedicated to your themes (it is a shuttered shopping mall). However, if it did, what kind of questions would you set for researchers?

I stumbled upon it myself one evening in 2019, with a friend. I’m not sure whether or not he knew it was there. We were later able to wander into the Caird Hall, where we caught the last few minutes of a gig by the Bombay Bicycle Club, who we learned hail from Crouch End. I was in Dundee to visit the art school the next morning. I need to fill it (the centre, that is), perhaps with physicists, who might be able to help me in my work.

Thank you, Patrick.

To learn more about Patrick Keiller’s work, check out his website.

Read my earlier post here:

What Power actually means by fashion is the capacity to transform the world on an industrial scale. Perhaps acknowledging this ambiguity, the only text in the book is a brief, awkward dictionary definition:

FASHION [fash-uhn] v., transitive. (a) To make or construct (something) out of constituent parts; to put together. (b) To form, mould, or shape (something or someone); to make or create (something) by a process of shaping or moulding. (c) To give (something) a shape or form appropriate to or suitable for something; to adjust or adapt to a purpose, a situation, an outcome, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary).

Without captions, dates, descriptions, or themes, leafing through the 288 images is a dizzying experience. Across 500-odd pages, they show the inhuman scale of modern industry. There are photographs of aircraft hangars, housing estates, building sites and factories. However, any sense of individual agency is crushed under the juggernaut of globalisation.

Much like the topics photographed, FASHION, as a book, is huge. At 3kg, it feels as solid as a shipping container. I was reminded of the quote often attributed to Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” The images are often striking and well-composed, but the subject matter is enough to induce a sense of reverence.

There are two types of photobooks: the first is planned or commissioned in advance; the second emerges retrospectively from connections in an artist’s oeuvre. This is the latter, yet there are glimpses of what the former looked like.

Despite the lack of captions, some locations are clearly identifiable. In the late nineties, Power was commissioned to document the construction of the Millennium Dome (now known as The O2), which was being built on a toxic wasteland in Greenwich. This was published as Superstructure in 2000. And it was with this project that Power found his mature register of making large-format colour photographs.

Before the Dome project, Power worked in black-and-white with a more humanistic approach, drawing on photographers like Tony Ray-Jones and Nick Hedges. With the Dome, he started a new way of working that rejected the impressionistic and subjective in favour of the monumental and seemingly objective.2 When you see a photograph in this book, you really know that it’s been photographed. It won’t need to be photographed again.

Power has described the way he sequences his photographs as being like “sentences without meaning, whimsical, nonsensical, yet intentional.” In this book, the vast industrial projects are broken up by images of wires, cords, tubes, and pipes. These are threads that suggest we could make all these things connect.

In 2005, the great advocate for the Millennium Dome, Tony Blair, made a notorious conference speech about globalisation:

What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening.

I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.

They’re not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities in a way that will transform their lives and ours.

FASHION captures the relentless inevitability of an era in which politicians lost control. As Blair implies, the best we can do is paddle faster to keep ahead of the flow. Interspersed among the large-scale industry are details like the hole in a man’s shoe: the human side of servicing the capitalist machine.

As Hamlet says: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! [...] And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

After checking I had the correct line, I discovered that Hamlet actually says, “What a piece of work is a man.” Like Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon — “one small step for [a] man” — the removal of the ‘a’ lends extra gravity to the phrase. But it is notable that there are barely any individual humans in the book. This is industry abstracted beyond the individual scale.

And so, while FASHION is not a great title, perhaps it doesn’t matter when the author’s name is on the cover. There is, after all, a clear nominative determinism to the way Mark Power has been drawn to document commanding structures over the past 27 years.

FASHION by Mark Power (Gost Books, December 2025)

One trend I’ve noticed in recent years is a significant increase in painting. Unwieldy conceptual installations are out; canvases are in. It makes sense: the painting is the art commodity par excellence. It’s unique, has a strong lineage, and is relatively easy to transport and store.

Back in November 2025, BBC News excitedly reported that David Shrigley was attempting to sell piles of old rope for £1 million. Like Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian — a banana gaffer-taped to the wall that sold for $5 million — people love hearing about the rich frittering away their money on nonsense.

Three months later, news emerged that Stephen Friedman Gallery — Shrigley’s dealer — had gone bust. The rope was presumably a last-ditch attempt to remain solvent. And it had failed.

The closure provided further evidence that the art market is in crisis, with geopolitical shocks and economic downturns leading to a 15% slump in its value in 2025. Nevertheless, clues that all is not well have been there for a while.

In 2024, Dean Kissick complained in Harper’s Magazine that politics had destroyed contemporary art, saying that it was no longer “a space of spectacle and innovation”. But I wonder how much this aesthetic caution is simply the result of straitened economic circumstances. As the gallerist Massimo De Carlo says, “If you love art but have no optimism [about the wider world], then your position is automatically more conservative. You turn to solid and traditional values.” Thus, painting.

And what of subject matter? It seemed to me that many of the art school paintings have a conspicuously photographic quality. They are not necessarily hyperrealistic, but there is an objective, knowing quality. As someone who writes about photography, I didn’t understand what was wrong with just showing the photo. What did painting the photograph add to the work? What was the point?

Initially, I cynically assumed it was because people value paintings more than photography.1 However, after chatting to a few of these painters, I learned that painting is an act of spiritual resistance to the Molochian churn of digital image culture. This was fascinating to me and shook me out of my cynicism. And so, rather than paraphrase what they told me, I questioned the artists directly:

As a painter who uses photographs as a reference, what does painting offer beyond photography? How does the image change in the process?

Here’s what they told me.

Nicholson Baker

Drawing a photograph slows you down. It helps you understand the subtlety of smiles, the guardedness or guilelessness of eyes, the variable bushiness and frolicsomeness of hair. It also forces you to look at everything that’s in the photograph — the coats and hats hanging on the wall, the standing lamp, the pile of brush over to the left, the signs in the window, the loopy particularity of an earring. You become the willing apprentice to the universe of a single instant.

Check out Nicholson Baker’s Instagram or his latest book, Finding a Likeness, which contains more examples of painting from photos.2

Kate Glenn

A little over three years ago, I returned to oil painting after a hiatus of around fifteen years. My return to painting came about because I wanted to reclaim nudes I had sent to people who didn’t deserve them. I was in conversation with my past self, looking at her before she knew what was to come. In rendering myself in oil paint, I was elevating the image, creating a piece of art that would only be visible behind a paywall, which was an important part of the project.

The act of painting became an exercise in self-devotion and self-esteem building through deep observational looking and practising an old skill that was coming back to me. I was asked why I didn’t just print a large-scale photo instead of painting an exact copy of the picture. But it’s the attempt and failure in the copying that interests me.

The devotion in time and energy focused on this image, zooming in and out, attempting to colour match, spending hours on the recreation that I think becomes its own thing. It’s not exactly photo-realistic. There is some kind of distortion and abstraction that happens when I translate the photo via oil paint.

Photography isn’t the whole truth, lenses frame and can distort what we aim to capture. The oil painting takes it even further from the truth, but adds more truth at the same time, another layer to the story in the many layers of paint.

Check out Kate Glenn’s Patreon and Instagram.

William Lake Armstrong

I think more like a photographer than a painter, but the process of a painting can reveal certain truths that photography doesn’t capture. You make a variety of decisions leading up to the photo, but once you take it, the image is the image. And while you can apply edits, the core image remains constant. But painting involves a wide range of decisions made throughout the process, both intentionally and intuitively. These choices dig up aspects which, while not captured in the original image, ring true to the moments and feelings surrounding it.

When you paint from photos, you have a baseline, an original to constantly compare to. The painting emerges through addition and subtraction: you add a colour that wasn’t originally present in the capture, you remove an object that had been the centrepiece of the image, you alter an element of the composition beyond recognition. I love those elements in the painting which build off the initial photo and unearth something new. They help me to better understand not just the pictures I take, but the experiences behind them.

Check out William Lake Armstrong’s website.

Sarah Palmer

Isabelle Graw wrote about how paintings have a liveliness because they contain the artist’s time. In a world where most have in their pocket a device that can take a quick photo of relatively good quality of anything you see, painting is an act of slowness. It provides an escape from the cerebral experience back into the body. It’s also much more disgusting than photography — I think it’s James Elkins who compares paint to poo.

I always start my paintings with a photo I’ve taken. I’ve been asked if it would be better to work from memory or imagination because my paintings don’t look like photos. But I don’t think working from photos means I don’t work from memory or imagination — I’m interested in photography because of the way it interferes with creating memory. Taking my own photos interferes with the way I remember a place, but also consuming photos others have taken gives me a perception of a place before I’ve even arrived.

Consuming photos of landscapes on social media reshapes our perception of the physical world, creating a circular relationship that mirrors the picturesque: just as 18th-century viewers judged real landscapes against paintings, we now see the world through curated feeds.

I paint and repaint until looking at the reference photo becomes unbearable. Only then can the real painting begin. Recently, I’ve begun my paintings by painting a dramatic sky in a different colour to the one in the photo. This upsets the palette of the whole image. One decision early on creates a chain reaction through the whole image, so by the end, I’m not translating a photograph. I’m solving a completely different problem.

Check out Sarah Palmer’s website.

Javier Ramos Bellanco

I work from photos that I have taken myself. Or, if they are not mine, after seeing them, I feel a special connection with the image, as if the image had been made by someone else for me. I feel something special, and I appropriate it.

Check out Javier Ramos Bellanco’s website.

Vinishree Solanki

I enjoy working en plein air, but there’s also something opportune about painting in the comfort of my home using photographs as reference. I look for photographs with strong compositions of mass and negative space; sometimes it’s the interplay of light and shadow that draws me in, and often it’s a candid moment, an act or movement that might be lost in memory.

When I work from a photograph, I tend to break it down into building blocks or layers to simplify the captured moment. I study the foreground and background, perspective, and focal point, dissecting the image so I can rebuild it in my own way. This process allows me to bring in my style. I have the freedom to accentuate some colours or blur some of the details to reduce the visual noise.

Painting from a photograph becomes more than simply recreating a moment. As I paint, I have the liberty to question or even distort the truth. It becomes an act of interpretation, almost like revealing what the scene meant to me in the process of painting. I want to be more than an observer, to become a storyteller, to create a fiction beyond what is seen in the photograph.

Check out Vinishree Solanki’s Instagram.3

This was the question I put to the Bell boys — Calum and Robbie — when they asked if I would do a piece on the Eritrean community in Glasgow. It was an article I felt hopelessly unqualified to write, having no connections or contacts from the Horn of Africa.

Were they trolling me like an apprentice sent to buy tartan paint?

Apparently not.

“Because we think you’d do a good job,” explained Robbie.

It is always nice to be commissioned for a job without having to pitch. But one should never say yes to opportunities which generate internal resistance. Fortunately, this was exactly the type of commission I had been wanting for years.

My heroes are writers like Tom Wolfe and photographers like W Eugene Smith. That is, journalists who became deeply embedded in the stories they told, while remaining witty and objective. More recently, I have been enjoying the writings of , whose dispatches from the provinces are always enlightening.

I like speaking to strangers and learning about the world as it is. Undoubtedly, the situation of Eritrean refugees gets to the heart of current debates over immigration. But this wasn’t a reaction piece to a news story; it was commissioned to observe what things are like on the ground.

Thanks to the Mill Media empire, I also got to work with an expert editor, Sophie Atkinson. It was Sophie who really helped push the piece beyond mere observation into something with moral heft. I am very pleased with how the story turned out.

Inevitably, much was cut in my attempt to carve out a coherent narrative, and here are some of the photographs which didn’t quite fit.

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.

It appears search engine era has come to an end. Few people can be bothered to scour search results for the answer to their query, preferring instead to get AI to do the work. And now Google have announced that from now on, its search will be AI-first.

For bloggers, this is potentially calamitous news. Search traffic was one of the only ways to get writing in front of a total stranger. Now we will have to rely on reader sharing and recommendations. While LLMs do include references in their results, they usually lead to fewer clicks.

Another reason for my dismay at the state of Google search is that it is the main way I find my own writing. And so, as an alternative for when I need to refer to myself, here is an index of everything I have published on this site.

2026

1. The Origin Story

2. The Biographical Fallacy

3. Is Greenock Rough?

4. Playing Detective with Sophie Calle

5. The Flâneur

6. Photo ... therapy?

7. Hanging On

8. The National in the Local

9. Yookay City of Culture

10. Speaking to strangers

11. The Smiths: A Novella by Michael Bracewell

12. The Standalone Photograph

13. March 2026 in Photos

14. Notes from Little Eritrea

15. The Photographic Painting

16. A Piece of Work

17. An Interview with Patrick Keiller

18. Deep Scotland

19. A Journey to the Underworld

20. All is Vanity

2025

1. Passport to Self-Knowledge

2. Going Deeper

3. The Photographer’s Eye

4. Derek Jarman

5. James Mackay

6. Luke Fowler

7. Dark Days

8. Long-term Photography Projects and the Spirit of Place

9. An interview with Laura Carreira

10. The Living Dead

11. Yookay Aesthetics

12. Josh Wirz in the White Cart

13. Saint Sappho

14. The Five Stages of AI Grief

15. Beck Slack

16. The Detonating Presence of Peter Hujar

17. Richard Prince

18. MONOLOGUE

19. Alan Dimmick’s Glasgow

20. Never Go Out

21. The Photobook of the Film

22. Celtic Celebrations Redux

23. “How very Ballardian”

24. London

25. Linder: Danger and Glamour

26. Photography as Conceptual Art

27. Depth of Field

28. Can photography capture the soul?

29. The Idle Photos of an Idle Fellow

30. Grayson Perry vs Photography

31. Pride and Press Photography

32. The Future is ... Pagan?

33. What the volcano told us

34. In the Shadow of the Volcano

35. Glasgow Rises Unity Rally

36. Photographing Drug Addiction

37. Is Photography the Secret to Longevity?

38. The Vampire Cheerleader

39. Missed Connections, Shot from the Hip

40. What I Listened to in 2025

41. Cultural Highlights of 2025

42. The Ten Best Films I Saw in 2025

43. The Best Books I Read in 2025

A to Z of Photographers

1. Diane Arbus

2. Bill Brandt

3. Robert Capa

4. Robert Doisneau

5. William Eggleston

6. Robert Frank

7. Nan Goldin

8. Philippe Halsman

9. Graciela Iturbide

10. Frances Benjamin Johnston

11. Chris Killip

12. David LaChapelle

13. Tish Murtha

14. Helmut Newton

15. Paul Outerbridge

16. Martin Parr

17. Louis Quail

18. Man Ray

19. Sebastião Salgado

20. Wolfgang Tillmans

21. Jerry Uelsmann

22. Roman Vishniac

23. Edward Weston

24. Zhang Xiao

25. Masao Yamamoto

26. Jean Yuzheng Zhang

27. The Alphabet

2024: Miscellena

1. Interview with Dylan Lombard

2. The Tourist and the Flâneur

3. I Dream in Photos

4. Celtic Celebrations

5. Nicéphore Niépce

6. William Henry Fox Talbot

7. Living to Eat

8. My day as an official parkrun photographer

9. An Experiment in Photojournalism

10. Sonica Festival 2024

11. Brutalist Glasgow

12. 50 Weeks of The Week in Photos

13. Quantity vs Quality

14. My 2024 Art Highlights

15. Top 10 Books and Films of 2024

The WIP (2024)

1. The WIP #1: New Year, New Format

2. The WIP #2: The Return of Medieval Glasgow?

3. The WIP #3: The pebble in the shoe

4. The WIP #4: Sturm und Drang

5. The WIP #5: The Empty

6. The WIP #6: Beyond Belief

7. The WIP #7: Love on the Rails

8. The WIP #8: Memory and Desire

9. The WIP #9: Viennese Whirlwind

10. The WIP #10: Sculpted

11. The WIP #11: Cultural Forces

12. The WIP #12: Open as usual

13. The WIP #13: Textures, Shapes and Objects

14. The WIP #14: The Bucket List

15. The WIP #15: Animal, Plant, and Mineral

16. The WIP #16: Colour

17. The WIP #17: Doon the watter

18. The WIP #18: The Meta Position

19. The WIP #19: God’s Own County

20. The WIP #20: The Hague

21. The WIP #21: Timenergy

22. The WIP #22: Going Viral

23. The WIP #23: Gee Aye!

24. The WIP #24: Broken Balance Beam

25. The WIP #25: Far East

26. The WIP #26: Alphabeteer

27. The WIP #27: Struggle for Power

28. The WIP #28: Extreme

29. The WIP #29: Anderston Centre

30. The WIP #30: Swimmingly

31. The WIP #31: What’s on your mind?

32. The WIP #32: The Birds

33. The WIP #33: Riga

34. The WIP #34: Brouhaha

35. The WIP #35: Panini

36. The WIP #36: Long Lens

37. The WIP #37: Bridges, Not Walls

38. The WIP #38: Wild Research

39. The WIP #39: Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

40. The WIP #40: The Substance

41. The WIP #41: The Truman Show

42. The WIP #42: Scenius Revisited

43. The WIP #43: Photo City

44. The WIP #44: Interesting Times

45. The WIP #45: Opening Hours

46. The WIP #46: Art vs Design

47. The WIP #47: Unmasking

48. The WIP #48: Mattress Head

49. The WIP #49: Contact Print

50. The WIP #50: Life and Death

51. The WIP #51: Gloaming

52. The WIP #52: The Silence of Suburbia

Total Integration (2022-23)

1. Nine photos from 2021

2. Year-long projects

3. Year-long projects with Ellie Harrison

4. Principles for health

5. Why we should all drink kefir

6. Reflections on time well spent

7. The uses and disadvantages of website archiving for life

8. Comedic Decoupling

9. Alcohol: a love story

10. 250 Parkruns Later

11. 250 Parkruns Later with David Barnett

12. The LiveJournal Moment

13. On Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

14. Photographic Fomites

15. What’s your thing?

16. What’s your thing? with Laura González

17. The All-inclusive Aristocrat

18. The Trade-off Mindset

19. Waves, rocks, and turning points

20. Nir Eyal vs Johann Hari

21. Reacting to Nir Eyal vs Johann Hari

22. In Defence of Broscience

23. What happened to Glasgow’s visionaries?

24. Following Through

25. Why you should get married

26. Total Integration

27. Total Integration with S

28. Entering the Neil Scott multiverse

29. Whatever happened to Oliver Braid?

30. Whatever happened to Oliver Braid ... with Oliver Braid

31. Split Ticketing and the Preston Model

32. Halfway

33. Surrendering to the Algorithm

34. On Scenius

35. The Book Group

36. All you need is …

37. The Alienating Affect of Effective Altruism

38. The Pivot to Video

39. The Hedgehog and The Fox go to a Yoga Retreat

40. Escapism and Escapology in Jack Reacher

41. Phenomenology of Social Media

42. Amor Fati

43. The Ethics of Street Photography

44. Interview with Alan Dimmick

45. Drawing the Line

46. 95 Theses on Cool: Parts 0 to 17

47. Expansion and Contraction

48. Integrity and the Critic

49. Reading Discipline

50. Interview with Camilla Grudova

51. Mannequins

52. The Size of Thoughts

53. Master of my Domains

54. Unclear Fallout

55. What if I was wrong

56. Things I found interesting in November

57. The End of the World as We Know It

58. Interview with Ewan Morrison

59. 2022: The Year in Photos

60. A Year of Weekly Writing

61. Why are Glasgow’s buses so bad?

62. Forget Pronouns, Tell Me Your Nouns

63. On Pain

64. The Design of Trophies

65. Chatbot Dystopia

66. The Side Project is Dead, Long Live The Side Project

67. Remembering The Future

68. The White Hair

69. Nietzsche and Photography

70. Things I found interesting in February 2023

71. Caught Between

72. Hopeless

73. In Praise of Scarcity

74. On Bringing Projects to an End

75. Diary: BUZZCUT Festival 2023

76. From Ideas to Ideology

77. Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline

78. The Photographer’s Eye

79. Finding the Mind’s Construction in an Interview

80. The Information Diet

81. Things I found interesting in May 2023

82. Team Amis

83. Should I stop writing blog posts and just edit Wikipedia?

84. Book Review: Porn – An Oral History

85. An experiment in Experimental Art Writing

86. Existential Productivity

87. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Like Graffiti

88. 7 Thoughts on UX Scotland 2023

89. Notes Towards a Successful Photo Essay

90. Pub Quizology

91. Unravelling the Threads

92. Rejecting Audience Capture

93. The Futile Search for the Perfect Routine

94. An Idiot’s Guide to Yoga

95. Zero Offspring Behaviour

96. Things I Found Interesting in August 2023

97. Photosketches of Spain

98. Book Review: O Brother by John Niven

99. 5 Psychogeographical Experiments To See the City Anew

100. Interview with Rachel Maclean

101. Book Review: Always Open Always Closed by Caitlin Merrett King

102. Interview with FK Alexander

103. An Interview with photographer Simon Murphy

104. Straitened/Straightened

105. Only Connect

106. Book review: All Desire is a Desire for Being by René Girard

107. Notes on Class and Art

108. One Hundred Weeks of Total Integration

109. Robinson and The Problem of Glasgow

110. The Year in Photos: 2023

111. Books of the Year 2023

112. Films of the Year 2023

113. The Year of Submission

114. The Years in Photos

115. About Total Integration

The Years in Photos

1. The Year in Photos: 2003

2. The Year in Photos: 2004

3. The Year in Photos: 2005

4. The Year in Photos: 2006

5. The Year in Photos: 2007

6. The Year in Photos: 2008

7. The Year in Photos: 2009

8. The Year in Photos: 2010

9. The Year in Photos: 2011

10. The Year in Photos: 2012

11. The Year in Photos: 2013

12. The Year in Photos: 2014

13. The Year in Photos: 2015

14. The Year in Photos: 2016

15. The Year in Photos: 2017

16. The Year in Photos: 2018

17. The Year in Photos: 2019

18. The Year in Photos: 2020

Miscellaneous Writing and Photography

1. If it is appropriate

2. COP26 in Glasgow

3. India

4. Dark Days Follow-Up

5. Death in the Afternoon

6. Japan

7. The Statues of George Square

8. Amongst the Orange Walkers

9. Quintessence of Dust

New Escapologist

1. The Marshmallow Liberation

2. Escaping your possessions

3. The Anti-Cliché Manifesto

4. Escape Depression

5. Escaping Distractions

6. How to Rewrite Your Script

7. The Bohemian Beard Experiment

8. Bohemianism and Entropy

9. The Sulking Ape

10. How to Make Decisions Like Steve Jobs

11. Drawing the line: an essay on integrity

12. Notes towards becoming a good citizen

13. Escape Thought

14. How to think about ‘How to Change the World’ in a World of Wicked Problems

15. Numbers

16. Practical interventions to make life less absurd

17. The Absurdity of Utopia: An Interview with Ewan Morrison

18. Imagining Russell Brand’s Revolution

19. Thoughtspasms of the Posthumous Trudger

20. Outsiders Against Competition

21. Everything I’ve learnt about happiness and productivity in the last ten years

22. The Essence of Eudaemonology

The Mind’s Construction Interviews

1. Interview: Patrick Wolf

2. Interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto

3. Interviews Bid from the Monochrome Set

4. Interview: Dickon Edwards

5. Interview: Franz Ferdinand

6. Interview: Jeffrey Lewis

7. Interview: Dan Rhodes

8. Interview: Adam Green

9. Interview: Stewart Home

10. Interview: Simon Bookish

11. Interview: Pat Kane

12. Interview: Momus

13. Interview: Bryn Phillips

14. Interview: Jamie Manners

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.

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.

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.

This review was originally posted on ’s , a newsletter about novellas:

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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4 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Neil Scott

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.