[2] 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."
[10] McLaren's book of his own street photography, The Crash (2018), documents the City of London after the financial crisis of 2007–2008, made over five years.
[14][15] The work was shown in a Document Scotland group exhibition at Impressions Gallery, Bradford[15] and at Berwick Visual Arts, Berwick-upon-Tweed.
[17] 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.
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.