In 1957, sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon wrote that “ninety percent of everything is crud.” But now it’s more like 99.999999%. It becomes harder to find the good stuff. The gatekeepers can’t keep up. The tastemakers are poleaxed. No wonder people look to pre-Internet culture for canonical certainty3 or surrender to the algorithm.

For those who contribute to the culture, it becomes a question of trust. Can I be trusted not to squander the reader’s time? Am I on the side of quality or quantity? Am I curating the abundance or throwing what Tobi Lütke calls “slop grenades”? Is the post useful? Does it even need to be useful? These are the kind of thoughts that go through my mind when I click publish on a Saturday morning.

It has been a long time since I wrote a links post, but I love how they become time capsules for brief obsessions.4

1. Happiness

“Happiness is a place between scarcity and abundance”, Finnish proverb. Wise words from the happiest place in the world.

2. Holiday Photos

When I was in Crete a few weeks ago, I didn’t just spend my time among the burnt-out ruins. I also went to the beach.

3. Nicky Blair

I saw a video of Tony Blair talking about his sons canvassing in the 2005 election and was curious what Nicky Blair was doing now. It turns out that his career went: teacher > football agent > defence-tech startup founder. When I posted this fact on X, it amassed 357k views and was reposted by Aaron Bastani, George Galloway, and Tanita Tikaram.

4. “Shoot it now, because it will never look the same again.”

A quote from when met Jay Maisel, the photographer behind the cover of Kind of Blue, who died recently.

5. Fleury-Mérogis Prison

I love a window seat and was amazed by the scale of Fleury-Mérogis Prison, which I saw outside Paris. Apparently, it is Europe’s largest, with 4,300 inmates—a mere 40% over capacity.

6. Can AI do Type Design?

I am fascinated by the Arts and Crafts font on this 1896 edition of two Thomas Love Peacock novels and was curious to see whether I could vibe code a variable font based on it. The result is not perfect, but a decent start.

7. Typography is hard!

There are not many celebrity typographers, but Paul Barnes is considered one of the best-known. His foundry, Commercial Type, have designed typefaces for The Guardian and Vanity Fair among many others. Their new font family is Spectator, a so-called Scotch Roman with a marvellously nerdy backstory.

8. Authenticity

Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about.

Link to speaking to .

9. Martin Amis performing Martin Amis

A short dramatisation of the scene in Martin Amis’s Money where John Self (Mel Smith) and Martin Amis (Martin Amis) bump into each other at lunch.

I heard about it from last year’s My Martin Amis live. Alas, ’s brutal takedown of Martin Amis from this year’s event was removed from the web. If anyone has a bootleg, let me know.

Martin Amis once gave Will Self a blurb calling him a “cruel writer—thrillingly heartless, terrifyingly brainy”. Oddly, Self only mentioned the “terrifyingly brainy” bit in his talk.

10. Glasgow Art Weekend

Rumours of the demise of Glasgow’s art scene have been greatly exaggerated. Although one gallery is closing, new things always seem to be happening. I had a good time at ’s weekend of activities, including seeing Jamie Crewe’s music side project, poisonous relationship.

11. Why We Like Things

Asterisk was originally the house magazine for the Effective Altruists. Over fifteen issues, it has developed into something much more interesting. This article on taste by is great.

12. UK AIDS Memorial Quilt

If you’re in Glasgow, don’t miss the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt at Tramway, which closes on Sunday. I have never been in a room that combined such heavy emotion with such joyful celebration.

13. Sonica

This is also the final weekend to see and hear Sonica, which has been a revelation, showing what is possible when you trust experts to curate a festival.

Sonica’s takeover of Pollok House was sublime, but my personal highlight was seeing art provocateur Dinos Chapman being berated for an hour by some third-year students at the Glasgow School of Art. I took this photo of him looking slightly battered after the encounter.

14. Kids’ Trends

Riley Walz scraped a website of children’s drawings to give an insight into a more innocent way of seeing the world. Check it out.

15. Note of the Month

This made me laugh from , especially the comments from those who didn’t read it properly.

Art may be imagined as consumerism’s dreaming, playfully recombining the elements of mass culture in promiscuous assemblages, and along the way happening upon items of use.

This passage leapt out at me because, for the past fortnight, one of my photos has been featured on a poster site as part of a project called Urban Coincidence, now in its second iteration.

It’s an image of pigeons drawn to a photo of a giant croissant, and it can be found in Glasgow’s Southside. To paraphrase Zhuangzi, is it an advert dreaming it is art or art dreaming it is an advert?

The Urban Coincidence project was initiated in 2024 by three MFA students at Glasgow School of Art: Douglas Rogerson, Sophie Stewart, and Sophia Archontis. On the website, they say they want photographs that:

capture something unusual, out of place, serendipitous, or thought-provoking hidden within the everyday [...] photography can amplify both the sensitivities and mundanity of daily life as well as disrupt the inundation of commercial advertisements by offering moments of reflection

Having visited all the places, I can confirm that once you are attuned to noticing the posters, they are often jarring, especially when placed alongside adverts for musicals. The photographs have a Martian quality that heightens the strangeness of the mundane.

A cynic might say that the sites’ owners, BUILDHOLLYWOOD, rather than being patrons of the arts, are simply raising the cultural status of poster advertising. But it’s difficult to be too cynical when seeing my photograph printed so massively and dropped into the city.

Photography is unusually well suited to being reproduced in poster form. The high street is not a white cube gallery, and the power of the photograph—which emerges from the era of mechanical reproduction—doesn’t rely on the aura of the unique object. The fabric of everyday life becomes part of the work. Everything from parking meters to pedestrians inhabits the same universe.

Flannery O’Kafka’s collaboration with Indepen-dance was displayed outside in Dundee recently. For me, this line of posters felt more vital than most of the art in the nearby McManus Museum. The McManus is a traditional, stuffy Victorian art gallery, full of gilded frames and picturesque landscapes. By contrast, O’Kafka’s work was astonishingly immediate.

On Instagram, she wrote: “My favourite way to show work—outside, pasted up.” When I asked them about this, they clarified: “For me, it’s partly about the photograph becoming part of the material of what it’s pasted on.”

Likewise, what felt like an occasionally claustrophobically intimate exhibition by Lisette May Monroe in Gulabi Gallery became a riot of punk-pink colour on the streets.

While fly-posters are generally ephemeral, pasted over with the next advert, they can sometimes have an unexpected half-life. Friend of The Crop, Matthew Rich, has been screenprinting posters for decades. When he lived in Manchester in the 1980s, he would print and fly-poster for Factory Records, amongst others. To prove that he hadn’t just thrown them in a skip, he took a photo of the wall, which has become a vivid archive of the era.

Of course, I am aware of the irony that my photo appropriates an advert that already exists. Like the pigeons, we are often seduced by images of the things we desire. Urban Coincidence helps jolt the viewer into a brief moment of lucidity.

The Urban Coincidence photos are scattered over the city. Visiting them was a good excuse to cycle and get in my daily exercise. Here is a selection:

Interview with the artists Douglas Rogerson, Sophie Stewart, and Sophia Archontis

Neil Scott: What led you to do Urban Coincidence?

Douglas Rogerson: All three of us had a habit of collecting lots of images of everyday moments that caught our eye. We wanted to share what’s happening around us just as it is, out in the world where it is already occurring, and to invite others to share their own.

Sophie Stewart: Our individual practices look at interruption and unrest within the urban setting, so it made sense for us to come together and create a project like this.

NS: What are your criteria for selecting images?

SS: I want something that makes me question if I’m seeing the image correctly the first time. Something humorous or quietly intimate. Or even something that’s like “what the fuck”. The images should also reflect the environment they’re placed within.

DR: It’s difficult to pin down. I tend to gravitate to more industrial subjects that can be seen as poetic. Sophie is drawn to the derelict, irreverent, and uncanny. Sophia brings a cheeky, playful, and humorous dimension. We always have such a great pool to choose from, and it’s hard to leave so many stunners out.

NS: How does this poster project relate to your art background?

SS: My practice explores notions of the “contemporary condition”—the human condition head-butting against modern living circumstances. I’m specifically interested in modern working conditions and concepts of happiness, success, and desire. Focusing on urban coincidences is a good way to break up the daily commute and try to see the world past pointed advertising and unattainable goals forced upon you by the attention economy.

DR: I have an affinity for what I affectionately refer to as “discards and disregards”—things used until they are no longer working, needed, or wanted and then left behind. I’m often thinking in terms of function, utility, and supposed purpose alongside personal experience and disillusionment. I really enjoy seeing how others notice the world, themselves within it or outside of it, and how everyday moments can capture what one feels without much, if any, added intervention.

Sophia Archontis: I’ve always had a community-engaged practice. I used to run a regular supper club for creatives called Opn Tble and have been focusing on showcasing emerging sound and music artists through a regular event called Electronic Experimentations. I move fluidly between art, photography, poetry, sound, and music spaces, which I think all express peculiarities within the everyday.

NS: What kind of feedback have you got about the project?

All: The feedback has been super positive, and the photos of the work in situ have added to the fun of the project. Even interactions from the public, like adding a sticker here and there, a bit of gum, graffiti, or a smush of mud, show that people are noticing the images as different from typical advertisements.

We owe a huge thanks to Creative Scotland for funding this round of the project and BUILDHOLLYWOOD for helping us make it bigger than we could have dreamed.

NS: Congratulations, Douglas, Sophie, and Sophia. I look forward to the next iteration.

The Urban Coincidence poster campaign runs from 14 to 27 September 2026. Check out the sites on this map.

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I first met Ellie Harrison when she was doing an MFA at Glasgow School of Art. Her work had focused on critiquing data collection and the neoliberal self. But Harrison realised that, to make a difference, she would have to move away from art into activism. The art world, for all its political posturing, has a terrible track record when it comes to making a tangible impact.1

In 2009, as a regular train user, Harrison started the campaign to Bring Back British Rail.2 This has been successful, and the madness of privatisation of a natural monopoly is coming to an end. She had collaborators along the way, but it was essentially a one-woman operation.

By 2012, in an interview I did with Harrison (reprinted below), she was already emphasising the importance of localism. This would solidify into the mantra “Think global, act local”, which was at the heart of her project, The Glasgow Effect. And, in 2016, she helped set up Get Glasgow Moving, a membership organisation dedicated to improving public transport across the region.

This week, Get Glasgow Moving is celebrating a decade of campaigning with an exhibition at New Glasgow Society. Quite a few of the photographs in the exhibition are mine, and I thought it would be nice to share them for those who can’t make it in person.

The Get Glasgow Moving exhibition is open until 23 September. Check out GGM committee member ’s report about the opening.

Bonus Interview

Back in 2012, before Ellie Harrison set up Get Glasgow Moving, I interviewed her for New Escapologist magazine. At the time, I was fascinated by her transition from data-collecting artist to active political campaigner.

Notes Towards Becoming a Good Citizen

Neil Scott talks to Ellie Harrison

The neoliberal orthodoxies of the past 30 years lie in tatters, leaving us in a permanent crisis of pollution, debt, inequality, and anxiety. Neoliberalism’s failure means the dominant political narrative is up for grabs: will this be in the form of Chinese-style state capitalism or feudal oligarchy or perhaps something else entirely? Could it be escapologism?

Ahem. Well, the problem is that escapologists don’t much go in for campaigning or politics. We live minimally, use few natural resources, but don’t tell everyone to do the same. Does this make us bad citizens? Should we try to improve society rather than simply rejecting its mad dash towards consumerist destruction? I don’t know, but I know a woman who might.

Ellie Harrison is an artist who creates witty installations on subjects such as financial crisis, climate change, and privatisation. She is also currently spearheading a campaign to Bring Back British Rail, which has—as of 5 August 2012—over 23,000 Facebook followers.

Harrison wasn’t always so politically conscious. I first became aware of her through her book, Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector, which charts her journey from self-absorbed quantification to eco-activist. Her MFA dissertation squares up to the fact that, for an artist, global warming changes everything and that it doesn’t matter how successful you are in your career if civilisation no longer exists. As she says in conclusion:

“[D]o you really want to look back on this pivotal moment in the history of our species and say ‘I did nothing’, ‘I did not make a stand’, or do you want to be able to say the opposite and to retain what should be our most commanding of all human motivations—our integrity?” Ellie Harrison, Trajectories: How to Reconcile the Careerist Mentality with Our Impending Doom (2010)

To find out more about her transformation from life tracker to socially engaged artist and the implications for new escapologists, I met up with Harrison in her studio in the East End of Glasgow. I started by asking her how she got into self-quantification.

Ellie Harrison: It started when I was 22, and I took a picture of everything I ate for a year. I wanted to see what a year’s worth of food would look like. Digital cameras had just arrived, so it was affordable. A by-product of this was that I was creating a database of everything I had eaten. What I discovered is that you can become addicted to recording your behaviour when you do it every day for a year. It makes you feel as though you’re achieving something.

Neil Scott: What do you think of that work now?

I’m quite critical of my younger self now. I think I was a bit of a moron. I was so caught up in looking at the details of my own life, I didn’t tend to look at the bigger picture.

On 1 August 2006, you made a conscious decision to stop tracking your life. What happened?

I realised that by constantly recording everything, you are living this dual life. One minute I’d say ‘that’s fucking brilliant’, then I’d realise that I’d have to record the event [in 2005 she noted every time she swore]. You focus on the recording, rather than where you are and who you’re with. I couldn’t just be in the world without documenting it. It was as though someone was always watching.

At one point, you were recording everything: every fart, every sneeze, every person you met, your mood, your weight.

I did that for a year: a Daily Quantification Record. Then, I tried to document EVERYTHING I did 24 hours a day for four weeks. That was really horrendous because on the first day I didn’t even want to get out of bed. At the end of each day, it took two hours to process the data.

And so you stopped tracking, started the Artist’s Training Programme and came up to Glasgow, which is famous for producing Turner Prize-winning artists. Did you think of it in careerist terms?

I came to Glasgow because I got funding and I wanted to do an MFA. I’ve become less interested in the petty little art world. Maybe there will come a time when I’ll try a completely different career.

Do you not think the artist’s position is a useful one?

I saw a quote from Queen Victoria on Facebook the other day about how ‘artists are dangerous because they mix with all the classes.’ As an artist, you move between these different layers. The artist is a moving target. Art exists to offer commentary on the world, but I don’t think what I do is just commentary. To paraphrase Marx: artists have just interpreted the world; the point is to change it.

Are you a humanist? Do you think humanity is worth saving?

Maybe it isn’t worth saving, but maybe I don’t have a choice because I am a human and humans are compelled to look out for other humans.

What do you think about technological solutions?

In my experience, human beings only need very simple things to keep them happy: other human beings, having nice food, having a warm place to stay, having good conversation, maybe travelling a little bit. What else is there? What else do we need?

Do you need to self-actualise on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to be a campaigner, or should you just go out and do it?

When I was younger, I had more energy and enthusiasm, and I was just doing it. It is only after having done things and reflected on them that you can get closer to self-actualisation. There’s a really cheesy quote from a Paul McKenna book: ‘Do not ask what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.’ God, I am full of cheesy quotes today, sorry!

New Escapologists are minimalists and don’t drive cars, but they also don’t tend to campaign. Does this mean they’re bad citizens?

I don’t think they’re bad citizens. I think I’m probably a bad citizen.

But you have this campaign to Bring Back British Rail!

I heard another quote at The School of Life: “It’s no good being a campaigner if you’re not a good neighbour.” I’m doing a national campaign now, and it feels too big. We should almost be campaigning for the people at the end of the street. Although I live at the end of quite a posh street, so I wouldn’t waste my time campaigning for them.

There is an interesting line in your dissertation: “Collaboration will enable us to surrender our egos to the collective force, liberating our ideas from their containment.” How have you found working with other people?

I am learning to work with other people a bit better. It’s difficult for a control freak because you have to learn not to control so much. You have to learn not to care so much, which is difficult because a lot of the work I do, I care so much about.

So the campaign to Bring Back British Rail is just you?

Yeah, it’s mainly just me at the end of an email and spending my weekends stuffing things in envelopes. All I have got to give is time.

What would you say to any young escapologist – or indeed older escapologist – who wants to become more socially responsible?

Anything is possible. It is possible to effect change. You just have to do something. Bring Back British Rail is inspired by the Situationist line ‘be realistic, demand the impossible!’ It is trying to popularise the idea of renationalisation because it’s such a taboo subject.

What do you think about people who pollute? Are you a compassionate person or do you hate them?

I think a lot of people do those things because they’re unaware of their actions. Some people just buy a new bottle of water every day and don’t realise why that’s bad. Data collecting has made me a lot more aware of what I do in the world.

What do you say to people who look at everyone else polluting and not giving a shit and think that their small contribution is not going to make a difference?

It’s like Gandhi says, ‘you’ve got to live the change you want to see.’ Unless you live it, you can’t expect anyone else to. That’s why I’m a vegan, because even though it’s really fucking awkward and I can’t eat ice cream or cake, I do believe that if everyone were vegan, we wouldn’t have the same disastrous consequences in terms of food production.

So where do you see yourself in five years’ time? Would you like to take a more active part in politics?

As Quentin Crisp said, ‘Living in the future is the death of happiness.’ But I think I’ll probably be doing something quite different. Maybe politics. I haven’t quite worked out how. There is a difficulty in being English in Scotland. But I’d like to do it at some point.

This article was originally published in issue eight of magazine with an illustration by .

Read my other New Escapologist articles and check out a later podcast interview with Ellie Harrison about year-long projects.

2

Drought, wildfires, intolerable heat, mudslides, worsening air quality — such has been our summer of climate change.

A few weeks before my wife was due to assist Kia Naddermier at a yoga retreat in a remote part of Crete, wildfires swept through the region, destroying anything that wasn’t made of rock or concrete. The hotel was still standing, but the reception was ruined after a gas tank exploded. Likewise, all that remained of a new restaurant was a corroded shell.

The owners have started to rebuild for the next season, but work proceeds in a desultory fashion. They are understandably devastated, and neither government support nor insurance cover has been straightforward.

Before Fisher used the line as a chapter heading in Capitalist Realism (2009),1 it had been alluded to by in his 1994 essay The Spectre of Ideology [pdf]:

[T]oday, as Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature’, of the stoppage of all life on earth — it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe …

For both thinkers, the line sums up the scale of the challenge facing the left in a world dominated by neoliberalism.

Some of the most promising left-wing proposals from a decade ago were in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s book Inventing the Future, which looks to Chile’s thwarted Cybersyn project as an example of how technology might be used for economic planning.

They envisioned computers being used to direct the economy so that humans could enjoy post-work abundance. In the era of AI, we might get something similar, except with techno-feudalists reaping most of the benefits.

The source of the quote is Fredric Jameson, who used it in a New Left Review essay, ‘Future City’ (2003) about contemporary architecture and science fiction:

Le Guin once described the buildings ‘melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.’ Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

After reading this, it felt uncannily symbolic to see a half-melted cash register amid the wreckage.

When Jameson writes “someone once said” in the preceding passage, he is slyly referring to his own preface to The Seeds of Time (published 1994, but delivered as Wellek Library Lectures in 1991):

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.

While less snappy, this version of the quote feels truer to what has been happening this summer.

Yet life persists. Out of the burnt scrubland, verdant grass emerges. Hopefully these photos can help us imagine what comes next.

I was too tired to protest my innocence, but the friend knew who to blame. “Have fun sitting next to this one,” she said. Thankfully, this had a chastening effect on my neighbour, who then did what everyone does when there is a spare moment and picked up her phone.

As the remaining passengers boarded, she scrutinised her photos from the weekend and decided which to add to her Instagram Stories. She would zoom in on her selfies, making sure that she and her friends were presented in the best light. All six were platinum blondes, but her hair was the blondest, her fake tan was the darkest, her lips the plumpest, and her fake eyelashes were the longest. While the crew prepared for take-off, she’d posted four photos and within thirty seconds had received half a dozen likes.

As the plane taxied, she obsessively checked the list of which followers had seen the Story and not tapped the heart. She ignored the request to put the phone into flight mode, only closing the app as the plane rose into the clouds and we lost the 5G signal.

What fascinated me about this was that it felt like watching myself. I, too, have been a compulsive checker. The phone is such an intimate device that it is usually not possible to see other people’s behaviour close up. But here it was: a mix of vanity, insecurity and social positioning.

Two weeks ago, Meta—the company behind Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp—agreed to pay $18bn for failing to protect teenage mental health. As well as the settlement, the plaintiffs want Meta to make sweeping changes to the app to make it less addictive, such as:

• turning off infinite scroll and autoplaying video;

• removing ephemeral posts like Instagram Stories;

• banning displays of likes;

• limiting use to two hours a day;

• prohibiting face-altering image filters;

• defaulting to the non-algorithmic feed; and

• disabling the app at night.

It remains to be seen if this will make a difference or if we can find new and improved ways to depress ourselves on Instagram. But, as someone who is also mildly addicted to the app, I hope the changes apply to everyone, not just teenagers.

Of course, there are many who are not led astray by Instagram. “It’s just a tool,” my wife tells me. “It depends how you use it.” They open the app for a few minutes, see wholesome content, catch up with friends and then do something productive. But tools have affordances which encourage certain behaviour.

And she is right. Just because a hammer can be used to murder someone doesn’t mean we should give up using it for nailing bits of wood. The difference is that these apps are designed to activate parts of the brain that are harder to consciously control.

In The Gossip Trap, suggested that social media is a threat to civilisation because: “All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering.”

I’d go further and say that, if you want to understand Instagram, you’d be better off going to a zoo or watching a nature documentary—anywhere you can see chimpanzees interact. These primates spend much of the day grooming each other by picking parasites out of each other’s fur, an activity we have replaced with clicking “like” on each other’s posts. The amount of grooming received depends largely on status within the social hierarchy. Sound familiar?

Instagram allows for a radical expansion of Dunbar’s number. According to Robin Dunbar, human beings are cognitively capable of maintaining social relations with around 150 individuals. Beyond that, the community fractures or relationships are too shallow. Thanks to Instagram, I can keep tabs on ten times Dunbar’s number. Certainly, I feel like I know some of my Instagram-addicted acquaintances a lot more than real friends whom I see a couple of times a year.

As well as getting a vague sense of their place in the social hierarchy, people learn to shape their posts around algorithmic expectations. Users come to learn what kind of content “does the numbers.” Selfies and drama do well, while arty ambiguity does badly. Each Story, whether posted or viewed, is like pulling the lever on a slot machine.

The genius of Stories is that they last twenty-four hours. This means that when you wake up in the morning, there are several hours in which a reaction may have occurred. One quick check, you tell yourself, to see how this small fragment of the self has been judged. Before you know it, you are on the Explore page seeing jiggling women, near-death jumpers, anger-inducing political news, football gossip, and other clickbait. Lives are lost in endless streams of content that render us incapable of focusing on anything important. It is a disaster.

As writes in his essay, The dawn of the post-literate society:

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

Young people I know call it “rotting”, short for bedrotting, which is the perverse pleasure of wasting your life in a world whose demands never end. It sometimes seems that social media holds up a mirror to your deepest desires ... and what people most desire is distraction. Indeed, recent research suggests that watching a stream of short-form videos shuts down part of the brain.

Being on Instagram is the cost of doing business in the modern world. It is like paying taxes. Instagram is where the people are, which means that’s where you need to be to reach them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But it’s not altogether clear that it is worth the effort. I have amassed a few thousand followers on Instagram. Yet whenever I post a link, the algorithm rarely shows it to more than a couple of hundred of them, even fewer of whom want to disrupt their state of flow by reading a Substack.

This is the problem with “it’s just a tool.” It is a tool with algorithmic demands. Just as the design of the hammer is best suited to a nail, the nail of Instagram is increasingly the short-form video. If you are not making them, you are not really in the game. My pals at The Glasgow Bell tell me such videos are effective, but I wince every time I see them. If that is the future, then I am out.

And so, this month I challenged myself to stop using Instagram. No posts, no Stories. Although thanks to the consolidated messaging app Beeper, I can still send and receive messages. I’ve had a couple of relapses, but for the most part, I feel infinitely less scattered.

When taking the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, I often see strange Martian landforms in the distance. They are reminiscent of Uluru in Australia, but their origin is quite different.

For a brief period in the nineteenth century, Scotland was at the centre of a fossil fuel boom. The chemist James Young (1811–83) discovered that it was possible to extract paraffin (i.e. kerosene) from shale rock. This fuel was used for lamps, replacing smelly whale oil, until petroleum came to dominate at the beginning of the twentieth century.

After being heated and treated, the black shale turned an orangey-pink colour. The spent shale was then dumped in the countryside, forming huge mounds known as ‘bings’.

Abandoned in 1925, quarried away as ballast for roads and football pitches, the Broxburn and Winchburgh bings went unregarded until 1975, when the artist John Latham (1921–2006) was briefly installed as artist in residence at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh.

Latham took the aerial view of the bings and saw in them unconscious monuments to the age of oil. He renamed them the Niddrie Woman to draw out their mythical resonances. For Latham, they were not simply waste products but ‘process sculptures’.

When I heard there was going to be an exhibition at Jupiter Artland inspired by the bings, I was keen to visit both.

I was accompanied in this by the novelist Chris Kohler, who hails from the area and even went to a high school named after James Young. His debut novel is about the spiritual impasse of modern Scotland and the dead hand of the Reformation. The next one is about mining … perhaps, I thought, the petrol would be tax-deductible.

It seems to me that every era has its theme. Whether consciously or unconsciously, artists are drawn to certain topics that capture the spirit of the age. In the medieval period, Christianity dominated. During the Renaissance, humanist confidence took hold. Romantics sought refuge in nature from the Industrial Revolution.

And now? All art these days is about climate change, even when the topic is barely mentioned. Climate change looms over our civilisation. It says: the world we once knew is ending. The weather is getting more extreme. The ecosystems that sustain modern culture are being destroyed.

Extraction was an attempt to wrestle with climate change by going back to the beginning of the fossil fuel era.

Carol Rhodes’ stark bird’s-eye view of the bings is a reminder that we have something most previous generations lacked: a view over our domain.

By contrast, the beautifully textured paintings of Siobhan McLaughlin use earth pigments taken from the land to embody extraction directly.

The most impressive thing in the exhibition was John Gerrard’s simulated gas flare, burning like a flag for our times, closely followed by Marguerite Humeau’s strange sculptural forms made from dead trees and honey.

While the exhibition was worth seeing, it made up only a small part of the Jupiter Artland experience. Elsewhere, it was fascinating to think about how other works have become relevant in the climate change era.

The most striking work is not in the exhibition at all. Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone Coppice, a collection of rocks embedded in trees, is fully alive to the fact that humanity is dependent on nature for support.

Overhead, a plane ascended from nearby Edinburgh Airport. Jet fuel is kerosene: the very substance that James Young helped extract from the shale.

As the heatwaves and wildfires ravage Europe, we are forced to face the unintended consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels. By connecting with the beginning of the era, perhaps we can find a way of going beyond it.

Extraction closed on 26 July. Jupiter Artland is open all year except January. Niddrie Woman will likely be around for at least the next millennia.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard.

Born in apartheid South Africa in 1957, Jillian Edelstein originally trained as a social worker, before becoming a press photographer in Johannesburg. She moved to London in the 1980s and built a reputation as one of Britain’s leading portraitists, working for the Sunday Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Time, and The New Yorker. She has over 100 portraits in the National Portrait Gallery.

One of her defining works, Truth and Lies (2001), documented South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Other assignments have taken her to Palestine, Ukraine, and even Glasgow. She has won numerous prizes for photography and has more recently been making films, including The Water Rats (2022) about a community of wild swimmers.

Neil Scott: Looking through your portfolio, it feels like a life lived forwards. There is such a variety of work. Has the new exhibition at Stills in Edinburgh been an opportunity to make sense of your career?

Jillian Edelstein: It’s not a retrospective. The word retrospective made me feel like I was about to step into my hidey-hole. But then the curator Tracy Marshall-Grant came up with the word ‘survey’, which is a teeny representation of some of the projects.

The poster for the exhibition shows Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the man who set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as a way to heal the wounds of apartheid. Why do you think that period — and your project — is so resonant?

It has had a resurgence because of Palestine and what’s been going on in the West Bank and in Gaza. Nelson Mandela was very outspoken about human rights and his message of reconciliation and dialogue — considering he’d been in prison for 27 years — still stands for so much. We need to revisit it as often as we can.

What do you think of South Africa now?

I haven’t lived there for a very long time, and haven’t visited for the past two years. When I hear stories of the xenophobia, the protests and attacks, when I hear about the clear corruption, I imagine that Mandela, in terms of his legacy, might be looking down and frowning.

Whenever I’ve met celebrities, I sometimes get a sense of aura from them. I’m never quite sure if it’s something I project onto them or if it emanates from within. What do you think?

The one time I experienced it was with Nelson Mandela. It’s very hard to describe without sounding twee or kitsch, but when I shook Mandela’s hand, there was this very powerful, internal, physical response, which I’d never had before and have never had since. A smile came onto my face as I met him and I couldn’t wipe it off.

The portrait you chose of him is reflective and has weight. But what else is on that Nelson Mandela contact sheet?

I decided to go close on his hands. I decided to go close on his shirt. There was that whole thing of him wearing these extraordinary shirts. They said you’ve got ten minutes and no lighting ... because his eyes had been damaged in the limestone quarries. So there’s the close-up of the hands, there’s the shirt, there’s one of him smiling, and one or two of him looking away — mainly three-quarter shots. But there’s that one reflective image, and that’s the one. I knew what was going on in his life at that time, so it felt like that was the image.

What do you think makes for a great portrait photographer?

It’s a number of things. Honesty of representation ... and creativity of representation. It’s a mixture of the technique, the gaze, and understanding.

It’s a collaborative dance because you have to put on some sort of a performance in order to put yourself across as a way of enticing somebody to put themselves across. It’s the dance of human communication and dialogue.

When somebody is resistant, you can feel that. It’s about whether you’re going to fight it or you’re going to embrace it, notice it, and reference back to them that this is clearly what is going on. It’s how you play with it.

John Updike wrote, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face”. When you photograph celebrities, how do you get past the mask?

If I’m encountering the mask, then I go to tap away at it so that the real person emerges. That’s what I’ve often managed to do. It’s about being real and saying this is me. I put forward my own vulnerabilities.

How much do you plan your shoots?

It’s about coming in with an open mind and coming in with my creative frame of reference. When I’m working, one of my goals is not only to surprise myself, but to surprise the viewers. I’m so fearful of boring people.

How about the idea of trying to get approval from the sitter or, indeed, the audience?

I think that’s a mistake. If you do want to get the approval, then you are probably not taking the risks you should take.

You trained to be a social worker. Did that help your photography?

In the four-year degree, there was psychology, social work, social anthropology, and sociology. It helped as a grounding for sure. I only did two social work jobs. One was for the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders, where I was going into prisons where people were about to be released or going into their homes after they’d been released. I had just discovered photography, and I would go in and sometimes say, “How do you feel about me taking your portrait?”

And now forty or so years on from then, what is your sense of purpose? What drives you to keep putting yourself out there?

I’m still hungry. The ideas are still there. At the moment there are a number of ideas that have not yet been birthed: the Affinities book and a film about Norman Wexler. I want them to happen sooner rather than later, so I can move on to the next idea.

Among People is at Stills in Edinburgh from 31 July to 24 October 2026. It is part of Edinburgh Art Festival.

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

21. A Life Lived Forwards

22. Niddrie Woman

23. Stopping the rot

24. After the wildfires

25. Activism beyond the Art World

26. Urban Coincidence

27. The Age of Abundance

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

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.

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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7 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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