Leah Mclaine

Leah Mclaine is a Malaysian-British photographer, born in 2001, Newcastle, North England. Growing up in a strict religious background of orthodox messianic judaism, Mclaine became estranged from her family because of tensions surrounding her sexuality during her time at Trinity College, Cambridge where she was undertaking a BA in Theology and Social Anthropology. She now lives and works in London, completing her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art where she is making her first book entitled Having Had Faith. Whilst primarily trained in analogue photography, using 35mm and medium format black and white film, Mclaine’s practice also employs writing, filmmaking, and retains a performative nature. All her work is hand printed by herself in the darkroom. Her practice is concerned with auto-theoretical methodology and literature, in which she attempts through intimate portraiture and theological reference to reconcile the experience of faith and religious encounter amidst the loss of God and exile from religious community. Despite now being apart from organised religion, her work continues to consider the impact of having had a religious perspective on the world, the world as created, created as good, permeated with light, unseen agents, a concept of salvation, religious encounter and the sublime. Therefore, there continues to be the spatiotemporal pole of “God” in her work, she regards the portraits as from a period of exile from wherever god is, and her intimacy with the queer friends surrounding her now is infused with a sense of searching for or returning to the divine through new methods of worship and devotion found in her practice.