ALYS TOMLINSON Gli Isolani (The Islanders)

Description

ALYS TOMLINSON Gli Isolani (The Islanders)

ALYS TOMLINSON Gli Isolani (The Islanders) is the latest project by the British photographer. The project documents traditional costumes and masks worn during festivities and celebrations on islands of the Venetian lagoon, Sicily and Sardinia. Over two years, Alys photographed locals dressed in costumes inspired by paganism, fables and folklore.

Working again on analogue film with a large format plate camera, the images evoke a timeless quality and invite us to enter a mysterious world of good and evil, the sacred and profane. Set against rural fields and crumbling stone, many of the portraits appear as characters we may have encountered in our own imagination, as boundaries between fiction and reality become blurred.

This is the first time this new body of work has been published.

The book is designed by renowned designer Stu Smith and published by GOST Books. Essay by art critic and curator Sabrina Mandanici.

Alys Tomlinson

Alys Tomlinson is an editorial and fine art documentary photographer based in London.

Having grown up in Brighton, Alys went on to study English Literature and Communications at the University of Leeds. After graduating, she moved to New York for a year and was given her first commission for Time Out, before coming back to London to study photography at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She recently completed a part-time MA in Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage (Distinction) at SOAS, University of London, which ties in with her long-term, personal project about pilgrimage.

Her book Ex-Voto was published by GOST Books in 2019 and she has just self-published her latest book Lost Summer. Alys combines commissioned work for editorial, design and advertising clients with personal work, which she publishes and exhibits. Alys is currently working on a feature-length documentary film called Mother Vera, which she is co-directing with Cécile Embleton.