McLaren made
television documentaries in Scotland and then in London, before moving to the USA and working as a photographer. In 2013 he was living in San Francisco Matt McCann wrote in
The New York Times that McLaren's
street photography "feels like a field guide to how normal things can be really odd, contradictory — and visually rich." He is a co-founder member of the
Document Scotland collective, founded in 2012 to make documentary photography about Scotland.
Street Photography Now (2010), co-edited with Sophie Howarth, is a survey book of contemporary
street photography, in which McLaren's photography is also included. ''Photographers' Sketchbooks
(2014), co-edited and co-written with Bryan Formhals, gives insight into the work and methods of 50 photographers with a chapter by each of them. Magnum Streetwise'' (2019), edited by McLaren, contains images he drew from the
Magnum Photos archive. McLaren's book of his own street photography,
The Crash (2018), documents the
City of London after the
2008 financial crisis, made over five years. The work was shown at the
Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) as part of the
Look – Liverpool International Photography Festival in 2011. Made in the run up to the
2014 Scottish independence referendum, McLaren's series
American Always, Scottish Forever depicts Americans with Scottish ancestry attending the
Highland games season in California—the athletes, musicians, artists, and visitors who hold a close affinity with Scotland. The work was shown in a Document Scotland group exhibition at
Impressions Gallery, Bradford McLaren's
A Sweet Forgetting was made after the
Scottish National Portrait Gallery asked Document Scotland to produce an exhibition in response to the Scottish independence referendum. McLaren's series is concerned with the involvement of Scots in the sugar economy of
Jamaica in the 18th and 19th centuries, built on the
slave trade. In Jamaica, he made photographs about the period's genealogical legacy, about the land which had once been owned by rich Scots, and what remained of their houses. He also photographed some of the country estates, mansions and schools built throughout Scotland with wealth amassed by Scottish
sugar plantation owners that enslaved Africans generated for nearly 150 years. ==Publications==