Artist Statement: Theodore Wilkins-Lang (American, b. 1999, Cairo)

Theodore Wilkins-Lang is an American photographic artist and 2022 graduate from the GSA, currently based in Glasgow. His work is characterized by a craft-based approach to photography, focusing on analogue, material making, contrasted by rigorous and reflexive research practice. Visually, Wilkins-Lang’s interests are centered around portraiture, considering the medium as documentation of authentic life. Supplemented by theories around mass-culture and the capitalist Spectacle, he attempts to fuse these two strands of his practice to create a counterpoint to the commodification of the image, which reduces the photographic subject to an ephemeral digital hieroglyph. 

Materially, he works in large-scale black and white darkroom printing, furthering his diametrical opposition to what he believes is the existential threat of capitalist visual culture - social media, advertising, etc. - to photography. Despite the constant recuperation of photographic art by the totalitarian Spectacle, Wilkins-Lang maintains his quixotic practice: he imagines the photographic surface as a productive zone of solidarity and empathy, a field of silver gelatin where the face of the portrait, ever so slightly uncanny, turns to the viewer and calls out to be recognised as vital and alive.