My guest is Neil Scott, a photographer, writer and designer who has written for The Glasgow Bell, Recessed Space, OutsideLeft, and Crumble Magazine among other places.
His Substack The Crop combines Neil’s photography with interviews, essays and philosophical digressions, some of which we’ll talk about in this episode. He’s also a prodigious appreciator of art, literature and music, and is often to be found at arts events, book launches and other assorted happenings all around Scotland and beyond.
We got together for a conversation that takes in the photographers and writers who have influenced his work, his latest projects on the people and architecture of Glasgow, the pros and cons of social media, thoughts on realism in visual art and photography, and the inspiration he has taken from J.G. Ballard, René Girard and Ian Hamilton Finlay, among others.
Scroll to the bottom if you want to watch the interview over at the Strange Exiles channel on YouTube.
Reading recommendations from Neil Scott
Early on, Neil introduces the concept of the ‘indexical’ in modern photography. Here’s an article from Aesthetics of Photography that explores the concept, which states:
Indexicality in photography refers to the inherent quality of a photograph to be a direct trace or imprint of the physical world. It signifies the causal relationship between the photographed object and the resulting image.
He goes on to mention a few of his photography influences and heroes over the course of the conversation, starting with Diane Arbus, master of the black-and-white portrait.
Next we discuss the recent influx of celebrities, brands and legacy media to Substack — I mention Charli xcx and Jameela Jamil, both of whom have found success here (rather unsurprisingly, given their profiles and fanbases). We don’t come to any conclusions about whether the presence of high-profile figures on the platform is a net good, but both of the examples I mention have some interesting and surprising things to say.
We talk about a few of our favourite Substackers from the Glasgow contingent — starting with Mike Sowden of Everything Is Amazing. A travel writer with a passion for science, Mike’s popular blog is a great introduction to complex but fascinating scientific subjects, and is well worth your time.
Neil mentions Brian Eno’s concept of ‘scenius’ — the idea that genius emerges not from lone figures, but from a creative scene that incubates and supports talent and experimentation. (I guess when it works you get Low-era Bowie, when it doesn’t you get Roxy Music.) Read Neil’s article on ‘scenius’ here.
We get into a bit of discussion about artificial intelligence, and I mention both the ‘dead internet theory’, and Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘enshittification’ — how websites and social media platforms get choked with advertising, lazer-focused on data capture, and increasingly, filled with AI slop. Doctorow’s excellent book on the topic is called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. From there, we talk a little bit about how Substack is funded, including a major investment from a fund backed by apocalypse-brained techno-libertarian and Trump backer Peter Thiel.
Speaking of Thiel, Neil explains how the young Thiel was influenced (and indeed mentored) by the philosopher René Girard. Luke Burgis wrote a good piece on Girard’s influence on Thiel that unpacks some of Girard’s ideas, and where Thiel has publicly discussed them. Neil goes on to mention Girard’s notion of ‘mimetic desire’ — the tendency of humans to mirror qualities in others that they admire. Andrew Gallix wrote a 2010 article on mimetic desire, which is a good primer for those who are new to the concept, and Girard. There has been a lot of discourse about Girard on Substack — this piece by João Pinheiro Da Silva and Mauricio G Righi is a fascinating read, commenting on the Dimes Square-affiliated playwright Matthew Gasda’s assertion that “We are all Girardians now” — Gasda also explains his view in this piece for Real Clear Books & Culture.
We talk about the exodus from Substack to other platforms, especially Ghost — this has been happening (and widely discussed) on the site, with many opting out due to Substack’s ‘Notes’ function, which sort of behaves like a mini-G1-Twitter, and others citing the platform’s hands-off approach to moderation, leading to accusations that Substack is “full” of Nazis. A lot of the latter debate stems from this rather ludicrous take by Jonathan M. Katz in The Atlantic. Katz convicts Substack on pretty scant evidence (as critiqued here by Freddie deBoer) and ignores the elephant in the room — every other platform from Facebook to Elon Musk’s X is also filled with far right content and hate speech, even Ghost itself.
Whether you like or dislike the social networking aspects of Substack, I’ve definitely found them a useful tool for growth, and as yet, my timeline is uncontaminated by advertising or slop (although I agree with Neil that the influx of celebrities, brands and short-form video is a bit of a distraction from the business of finding, making and reading interesting long-form writing).
Next we talk about Neil’s essay on photographing addicts, and he mentions the work of US photographer Nan Goldin, as well as Larry Clark, and Glasgow’s Aidan Mark Wilson. Here’s an interview with Goldin from The Guardian, which includes some of her seminal work on the topic. Neil also mentions visionary filmmaker Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters), whose ‘one sheet’ approach to planning a project is covered here by No Film School.
We talk about the much-discussed notion of whether photography can ‘capture the soul’ of a subject, as covered by Neil back in July — he mentions Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. This leads us back to Girard, and on to novelist and nonfiction author Geoff Dyer, whose two books on photography Neil greatly admires — these are The Ongoing Moment and See/Saw.
After the break, we talk about Neil’s ‘Z project’ — he introduces it here. This involves taking photos of people on the streets of Glasgow’s ‘Golden Z’ — a stretch of retail, office and living space in the city centre which (it’s fair to say) has seen better days, with various plans to revitalise and rehabilitate it floated in the past few years. Neil walks these streets most days, so in 2025, he started taking some ‘street photography’ shots of its residents, users and passers-by.
You can see some of the Z project’s outputs on Neil’s Instagram (and in this post). Neil also mentions Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which he explores the concept of the ‘punctum’ — the aspect of an image that captures and holds one’s attention. There’s a nice article on this over at Frieze.
We briefly discuss the difference between DIY zines and photography zines — shout out to the fantastic Glasgow Zine Library. We weigh up the pros and cons of ‘print on demand’ publishing, and how using POD services can affect the ‘feel’ of a book, with reference to some of the editorial work I do for Revol Press.
This leads Neil to mention the new film GAME, written and produced by Portishead / Beak / Invada Records head honcho Geoff Barrow, and starring Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods. The story of the film was partly inspired by J.G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island, itself inspired by Robinson Crusoe.
We stay with J.G. Ballard, and discuss Neil’s recent essay on the ‘Ballardian’ aesthetic, and how it informed the theme of 2024’s Met Gala, which was loosely based on the Ballard short story ‘The Garden of Time’. This is one of my favourite of Neil’s essays and really gets to the heart of what is Ballardian in our current moment, and how Ballard’s ideas and aesthetics can be misunderstood or misrepresented in pop culture. As he writes:
This is what Ballard represents—blind, purposeless inevitability. With Ballard, the catastrophe has already happened and we are waiting to see it play out […] Ballard rarely seems to warn us about technological or political trajectories; he is sceptical of our ability to change course. Instead, at his best, he submits to vulgar reality as it is.
Neil tells me after the recording that he regrets describing Ballard as a “realist” but I stand by it — there’s something grim, grubby and very British about Ballard that is part of what makes him unique. I connect this discussion of aesthetics in Ballard to my ongoing research for an upcoming project on Philip K. Dick, and talk about the reasons why Total Recall is less ‘Phildickian’ than Southland Tales.
You can hear me speak at length about all things PKD on a recent episode of Method and Madness, in which I take a deep dive into The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch alongside friend of the pod Brad Kelly. Neil mentions UBIK as his favourite PKD novel, dealing as it does with entropy, and collapsing realities. I’m still hoping Michel Gondry secures the rights to direct that one soon. We chat a little bit about how dystopia and ‘hope’ in Ballardian and Phildickian cultural products are strange bedfellows, which is a concept I explore in The Darkest Timeline with reference to the philosophy of John Gray.
Neil finishes with a tip of the hat to the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay — there’s a nice wee profile of him over at the Little Sparta blog. Here’s a short poem he wrote, called ‘The Dancers Inherit The Party’:
When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –
Not so when I have danced for an hour:
The dancers inherit the party
While the talkers wear themselves out and
sit in corners alone, and glower.
Thanks to Neil for a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation. Find him on (all of) the social media platforms, and make sure you subscribe to The Crop to stay up to date with his essays and photography.
Next up: Revol Press meets Strange Exiles
Soon, I’ll be releasing the first of a series of extra episodes with Revol Press authors — I’ve featured a few already, with some great conversations, including artists and activists Adam and Tish Turl.
For the first of these ‘crossover’ episodes, I’ll be speaking with author Gareth Stuart Farmer, whose debut essay collection on neurodiversity will be published with Revol in 2026. After that I'll speak to Robert Faure Walker, author of Love and The Market, whose new book on Carl Jung will also be dropping with Revol next year. This is in addition to the main Strange Exiles series — so you'll be hearing lots more from me in early 2026.
In the meantime, I hope you’ve been enjoying my ongoing series Crisis Masculinity — I recently shared the first of a series of exclusive guest posts by some of my favourite thinkers. The first one is by Jason Myles of This Is Revolution. The most recent essay in the series itself is ‘Starring Ryan Gosling as Ozymandias’, which explores how Gosling’s semi-mute performances can help us understand some of the knotty problems at the heart of modern identity discourse. Part 4 is coming in a few weeks.
See you soon folks — take care of each other.
— Bram, Glasgow, December 2025
