Leah Mclaine

About

Leah Mclaine is a Malaysian-British photographer and writer, (b.2001, Newcastle, England). She completed her BA in Theology and Anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge before progressing to her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art to establish her practice. On receipt of her acceptance to the Royal College of Art, Mclaine was awarded the Leverhulme Scholarship.

Mclaine’s practice emerges from the context of her growing up queer in a strict religious background of orthodox messianic judaism, and following irreconcilable tensions, becoming estranged from her childhood religious environment. Whilst at the RCA she developed her first book, Having Had Faith,  in an edition of nine which sold out at OffPrint, Tate Modern this year in which she explored the concept of what to do with a “religiously-tuned body when the mind has lost faith”.

She is particularly interested in the concept of “faith” not as some innate given capacity to believe; but rather, something the body and mind has to work hard to attain or to get back to. She finds this topic of faith to be a central issue for many young people today, in a generation who largely have lost touch with the faith ingrained in their childhood, either as a consequence of prescribed incompatibility with sexual identity, or a loss of hope in general with the world and the future. This turn back to spirituality, outside of the bounds of organised religion or liturgy, emerging in a prayer perhaps that catches one off guard when in trouble is what drives Mclaine’s work today.

From her final degree show, Mclaine’s work was acquired into the collections of two private collectors, and she was awarded the Labyrinth Photographic Prize which functions as a darkroom residency for the year following her graduation. Whilst primarily trained in analogue photography, using 35mm and medium format black and white film, the judges of the prize described Mclaine’s portraits as having “full potential to become filmic: an auteur style making its way to the surface”. She was further shortlisted this year for the Taylor Wessing Portrait prize at the National Portrait Gallery. Having devoted her MA to mastering printing techniques in the darkroom, she looks forward to applying her understanding of light towards a career in filmmaking.