Theodore Wilkins-Lang is an American photographic artist and 2022 graduate of GSA, currently based between Glasgow and Amsterdam. His current project, Archive of the Other, attempts to challenge contemporary visual norms around the photographed ‘Other’, positing dramatic, present, and large-scale portraits in opposition to the digital image culture of small-scale ‘disposable others’.
This practice forms an extension of his wider goal to find reason and necessity for photography in this oversaturated contemporary visual landscape. Wilkins-Lang imagines a photographic surface as a productive zone of solidarity and empathy, a field of silver gelatin where new Others come into being. The face of the portrait, ever so slightly uncanny, different from its original subject, turns to the viewer and calls out to be recognised as vital and alive. The work asks the viewer to reckon with this uncanny other, and to accept it. Here Wilkins-Lang finds definition for the existentialist photography he strives towards, and where he finds, in ways, the necessity to photograph.
His work was selected for the 2023 Scottish Portrait Awards and he has shown excerpts from his thesis project We Others throughout Scotland since graduation. He is currently collaborating with Dutch interdisciplinary theatre cooperative LENZ as a video designer.
