Artwork

Her images speak as much about inwardness as they do about community. Her practice, informed by her studies in theology and anthropology, is rooted in portraiture, queer literature; it traces processes of becoming: queer, spiritual, relational. 

Photography first entered Mclaine’s life out of necessity rather than artistic pursuit. After becoming estranged from her family as a result of developing tensions between her queer identity and a strict religious environment, she began documenting her life as a way of preserving moments that might otherwise go unrecorded. “Usually you have a family album, but I wasn’t going to have any during my twenties, and it really mattered to me.”  Feeling herself on the cusp of change, she bought a cheap camera and began photographing compulsively, using the medium as both record and refuge.

What began as a deeply personal act of documenting, soon expanded into a communal practice. In 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 transitional 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.

Portraiture is central to Mclaine’s work, but her approach resists the conventions of either documentary realism or fixed representation. She is acutely aware of the harm that can occur when an image claims to fully describe its subject. Her engagement with queer photography lineages, including Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar and Jesse Glazzard, offers an alternative approach grounded in care, intimacy and mutual recognition. “I see the people in the photos as varying instances of revelation,” Mclaine notes. Her subjects are never arranged to serve a predetermined narrative. Instead, they appear as they are in that moment, participating in a shared space of play, performance and trust, often rediscovering themselves through the fresh encounter with their image.

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.

Mclaine’s series, An Understanding of John 1:1-5. is a collection of photographs and writing that draws from a particularly formative two-year period during her time in Cambridge. Though many depict people, the photographs are also marked by a striking inwardness. Figures often appear contemplative, distant or suspended in silence, reflecting both a shared intimacy and isolation. Alongside portraits, her work features images of objects and spaces illuminated by a light that seems to emerge from the shadows. “I’m much more interested in objects that just quietly appear,” she explains, resisting what she describes as the impulse to photograph with conquest or intention. In this way, photography becomes something that happens to the artist, rather than something imposed upon the world.

For Mclaine, writing exists alongside photography rather than in service to it, as a parallel mode of inquiry. Her photographs, she insists, cannot fully communicate the ideas she is grappling with. Text allows her to articulate tensions between theology, queerness and lived experience that remain latent within the image, to invite slower, more reflective ways of engagement.

Leah Mclaine completed a BA in Theology and Anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, before undertaking an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Leverhulme Scholarship. Her recent work has been presented in the RCA MA Photography Degree Show, and her first artist book, Having Had Faith, sold out at Offprint, Tate Modern. Following her graduation, her work was acquired by two private collectors, and she was awarded the Labyrinth Photographic Prize, a year-long darkroom residency. She was also shortlisted for the 2025 Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery and is a recipient of the 2026 Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch the Artist commission.