Back in February of this year Sam Rye and Jack McKenna launched scant, a new poetry and photography magazine, with an exhibition at Manchester’s Saan Gallery. We posed a few questions to learn more about the thinking behind scant and how it came together.
What is scant?
scant is a poetry and photography magazine that collects global contributions responding to a prompt focusing on themes of transience and sparseness in our current.
We believe these themes are defining elements of our time. Transience reflects how there is constant development in many areas of our lives, and sparseness how this development actually feels not like growth but in fact its opposite—natural and spiritual depletion.
Of course, we deliberately left the prompt open, so our contributors could interpret what these themes might mean to them in the context of their own lives and experiences.
What inspired scant?
The impetus for scant arose from the context we find ourselves living through.
This context is one of ecological destruction, widespread economic precarity, and assaults on our attention and free time. This feeling that we and our natural environment are being squeezed more than ever before, that everything is becoming temporary, and the philosophy of growth constantly parroted bounds us from all sides.
With the magazine, we wanted to create an artefact that expressed this current climate in various ways in two art forms we both love.
Who are the contributors and how did you select the pieces included?
To express the variety of individual experience within this global context was important for us.
scant features work from sixteen poets and photographers from across eight countries around the world. Finding the contributors was a mix of selecting organic submissions and careful curation. There were certain poets and photographers that we approached with the intent of getting them involved because we felt their work, whether formally or thematically, embodied the ethos of scant. And we were excited to give them a platform. A lot of the contributors we featured were found by happy accident on various social media platforms.
What we really wanted to avoid with the magazine was the feeling that the contributors had been brought together with no conceptual focus. We tried to create resonances between the chosen pieces, a sense of continuation and direction beyond appropriate sequencing. In that way, the magazine could stand by itself as both concept and artefact.
Why is this project necessary now, in the broader context of the arts and publishing landscape of the North West?
There are a lot of DIY poetry journals out there, and great ones at that. We didn’t want to do something that was already being done and being done well.
When it came to scant, we saw an opportunity to create a dialogue between poetry and photography with a clear focus. It wasn’t just a matter of doing something that had hardly been done before in the North West, it was about bringing together stereotypically disparate art forms and trying to create an international dialogue between them in the hope of articulating many fundamentally connected modes of experience.
We quickly learned that DIY didn’t have to mean local, so ensuring it had a global outlook was central to our work. This is because the issues that surround the conception of the magazine are all issues that implicate us as communities, everywhere. Art is how we choose to respond collectively to the issues of the world we find ourselves inhabiting. scant is an expression of this idea.
What are the ideas behind the cover design?
The image on the front cover was the result of using a fifty-year-old analogue camera to capture a polluted shore with reflections. The chemicals corrupting the natural elements had a second reaction with the colour on the film. A motion blur effect was then applied in post, which retroactively allowed the colours to further harmonise. In this way, the design embodies the warping of our everyday surroundings.
As a physical artefact, scant functions in opposition to the digital landscape, whilst its textural aspects—we used recycled uncoated paper—foreground the tactile relationship we have with our environment.
Design, in short, was a driving force of the identity of scant. We wanted to be sure that the contributors’ work was packaged in a way that emphasised their ideas.
You launched with an exhibition, why was it important to you to have an in-person event to celebrate the physical magazine?
It was great to put on the launch of the first issue of scant at Saan Gallery in Manchester in January. Meeting some of the contributors for the first time and experiencing such a positive turnout was very rewarding for us, and heartwarming!
The event had a purpose too. Abstracting the works from the context of being between two cover pages and displaying them on walls lent the individual works a life beyond reproduction and as a tangible counter to how they would appear on digital channels.
Most importantly, the event brought people together. If scant emerges from the fracturing of structures and society, it had to respond conversely.
Where can people pick up a copy?
scant is available directly from our online store. We’re also currently stocked in in store at UNITOM (Manchester), in store at Jot Bookshop (Manchester), and in store and online at Good Press (Glasgow).
What next for scant?
We are focused on ensuring that scant is appreciated by a diverse readership. This primarily involves reaching out to shops to get it stocked. We’ll also be sharing some snippets of the works online to shed more light on the contributors.
We’re very happy with what we accomplished with the launch of scant. There are currently no plans for another issue, as we want to avoid treading the same ground for the sake of continuance.
If it feels right, and we have something else to offer by doing another issue, we’re sure scant will return in some form.
Published 01.05.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Interviews
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