Oliver Smart

What began as a deeply personal act of recording soon expanded into a collective practice. At Cambridge, McLaine found herself among a network of queer friends who, like her, often remained on campus during holidays, unable or unwilling to return home. Photography became a shared language within this provisional community. Teaching herself to print in a dilapidated darkroom beneath Trinity College, using expired chemicals and learning through trial and error, McLaine produced image after image, driven less by formal outcome than by the urgency to witness, reflect and remember.