Gracie Beck Schylling

Prompted by her studies in theology, the question of whether a photograph can depict a religious experience is recurrent in her thinking. For Mclaine, the darkroom becomes a site of theological resonance, a womb-like space, cruel and generative at once, where images emerge not through light, but through darkness. “The only thing that’s light is the paper,” she explains. “You begin to see the picture emerge, through darkness.” It is this process of developing film, which for Mclaine, echoes religious metaphors of awakening and grace: the soul as a surface made ready to receive something not yet visible.