Welcome to The WIP aka The Week In Photos. Originally begun as a way to use Instagram intentionally, The WIP is now a weekly photo journal and a space to share things I find interesting.
According to Ian Bogost, social media is over. The Tower of Babel (Twitter) has fallen, scattering the tribes across the web. The other big platforms are increasingly reliant on engagement hacks that target baser instincts. Substack provides an ad-free environment without algorithms or trickery. It also allows me to use hyperlinks and doesn’t resize the images to the same size.
The WIP is a work in progress, but the basic premise is that I share up to ten photos on a Saturday morning with a brief caption — it could be a comment or a review. It is a public diary, a way of remembering the week that was, and a space to share ideas.
On New Year’s Day, I visited the Sighthill Stone Circle, the first astronomically aligned stone circle built in Britain in 3,000 years. It was created in 1978 by science fiction author Duncan Lunan as part of a jobs creation scheme and shows that something doesn’t need to be ancient to become a site of interest. You just need to create something interesting and people will fill it with meaning.
One could say the same thing about New Year and our resolutions. All over the world millions decide to live differently just because some numbers on a calendar change. It seems absurd, but these abstractions provide anchor points to make collective sense out of the jumble of time.
One new addition near the stone circle is Wolfram Graubner’s The Singing Hollow, which is a rock into which you stick your head and hum until your whole body vibrates.
In the early history of the human race it is likely that humming was practised more even than dancing, singing, drumming and whistling as a stimulating "tuning in" for the entire organism.1
Here is a video of what it sounds like:
The hall of Tramway 1 is difficult to fill, but Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran gives a good go with his totemic figures. It’s like a post-apocalyptic religion made by scavengers with unreliable memories of the old gods.
There is a story endlessly retold in self-help books that a ceramics class was divided into two: one was told to make one perfect pot, the other was told just to make as many as possible. The latter group, so the tale goes, made much better pots. Sounds good, but as Austin Kleon revealed it wasn't true. I was reminded of this at Tramway. Nithiyendran has made dozens of figures but they have no charge. Compared to the startlingly refined African figures on display in the Trembling Museum on the other side of Glasgow, the difference is stark.
This week I wrote about Diane Arbus and the desire to stare. I thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of Dylan Lombard, a fellow photographer who has discussed what it is like to be stared at. Read my interview with Dylan Lombard.
On Tuesday, I watched Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023), a film about a novelist accused of murder with some very circumstantial evidence, which I heard about from Camilla Grudova . Somehow, miraculously it manages to sustain tension across 2h30m of talking. I felt sordid and uncomfortable after watching but I am glad I did. Sandra Hüller (previously seen in Toni Erdmann) is again superb.
I’ve spent the week clearing up loose ends and getting ready for the year ahead. Katherine Angel wrote a great post last week, inspired by Oliver Burkeman, about why you shouldn’t do that.
I could spend hours tidying, sorting, trying to turn myself into some super-organised person. I could definitely be more efficient. But what I have to do, as often as I can, is spend some time working on the book. If I don’t, I feel angry and frustrated. My flat is messy, I’m not on top of lots of things in my life, there’s tons that falls by the wayside, but mostly — mostly — it’s OK.
I know people who are extremely organised, so much so that they seem to have organised all the creativity out of their lives. Some dysfunction, some messiness is necessary, but that momentary feeling of being on top of everything … ah, what bliss.
Here is the full caption:
It’s good to see this on Substack. Much easier to read your words and appreciate your photos compared to Instagram.