Alys Tomlinson
All images are copyright Alys TomlinsonMichael Rippy: To begin, how did you get started as a photographer, what were your early influences, and how have you progressed?
Alys Tomlinson: I got started when I was at university. I was actually studying English literature. My family was very academic, and I didn't study photography initially. It wasn't an option that I had ever considered, although I was always very interested in reading, storytelling, poetry, and visual language, particularly through cinema and cinematography. I remember my dad gave me a 35 millimeter Pentax film camera when I was at university, and I became very interested in that.
I was using a lot of black and white film at that point, and I started working for the student paper, which was great because I had access to interesting people in the public eye. Actually, people who otherwise wouldn't be so interested in talking to newspapers, but I think, who were reminded of their own student experience, and up for being interviewed and photographed. I also joined the camera club and took a course in photography through the City and Guilds program at the local college. That was when I started thinking, "Well, maybe this is something I could consider as a longer-term career prospect." It wasn't until I came back to London and studied photography formally for the first time at Central Saint Martin's School of Art that it became something I thought could be a serious career path for me.
MR: Can you say more about your education? How did you become involved with a pilgrimage course and a part-time MA?
And what is the SOAS at the University of London? How did that program advance your photography?
AT: I had been working mostly as a commercial photographer for about seven or eight years, trying to survive from photography, to make a living. I was getting very frustrated because I wasn't able to put in the time, and I didn't really have the mental space to think about a proper long-term project. It was always battle for me, balancing making a living and pursuing personal work.
It just became very difficult. I had started thinking about this project, about pilgrimage, which later became a large body of work called Ex-Voto. Pilgrimage was alien to me. I'm from an atheist family. Well, certainly agnostic. It is not that I was discouraged from thinking about faith, but it certainly wasn't part of my upbringing. I was very, very intrigued by Lourdes, which is a hugely famous Catholic pilgrimage site in the south of France. I started thinking about beginning a project there. When I first went there, I felt a little bit like an outsider, almost like an imposter.
Then I thought, "What if I study for an MA, but part-time so I can continue working in photography?" But I decided very specifically not to do an MA in photography. I found the only MA of its kind at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. I enrolled an MA in Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage. It's hard to say exactly how it affected my photographic work, but I certainly felt much more immersed in the world of pilgrimage and in understanding the reason for pilgrim's motives.
When I started the MA I had been going to Lourdes for two or three years, and I ended up writing my thesis about bodily practice in Lourdes. It became much bigger than just a photographic project. I would spend days and days in Lourdes, observing through an anthropological lens. I was working ethnographically, thinking about the anthropology of travel, tourism, and pilgrimage, and spending a lot of time observing and making notes.
It made me think about the images differently and reconsider my approach through an academic and anthropological structure. While I was visiting Lourdes and taking photographs, I was working on my book Ex-Voto. But I was also in London, in the library, reading and researching, in seminars, and in lectures. It enriched the way I thought about my subjects. I definitely understood the notion of pilgrimage on a much deeper level as a result of studying in that way.
MR: It's interesting that you felt like an imposter. It is curious that you come from an atheist background but wanted to investigate the religious practice of pilgrimage, in a specific place. How did you approach it, and what kind of impact did the project have on you?
AT: It made me much more open-minded. Although I am not a Catholic, I saw a lot of value in the expression of faith I witnessed in Lourdes, which is well-known for drawing many very sick people who go with great hope—perhaps that they will be physically cured, but more that they will experience spiritual renewal there. I really did witness the strength and comfort they derived from their faith and from being part of a very strong community, where people looked after each other. I think also, part of the experience for me was being in nature and escaping urban life. I very much enjoyed that aspect of it.
Any project that I do, and certainly my long-term projects, they are about exploration and curiosity; they are about discovery. I want to learn all the time and educate myself. For many of my photographic projects, including my most recent, Gli Isolani, which is about Italian islanders and their rituals, I look at the lives of people who are very different than I am or who have a particular ethos or ideology that doesn't really fit with me, but that I'm very much interested in exploring. What fascinates me is the attempt to understand, not exactly the other, but to understand what people are feeling, what they're experiencing, and trying to relate that through my photography. That project in Lourdes was published as a book titled Ex-Voto and exhibited quite widely. What was also quite interesting for me was that in the beginning, when I still felt that I wasn't really supposed to be there—I suppose I felt that I wasn't qualified to be there, on a spiritual level or a photographic level—was that I actually began shooting it all in color, and it was much more editorial.
The more time I spent there, the more I was immersed in my academic writing. As the project developed, I realized that what I needed to do was to somehow express how I was feeling in these places of great spirituality and faith. That's when I decided to change my approach entirely and shoot in a much slower, more considered way using a large format camera and in black and white.
What really struck me about Lourdes, and Grabarka, a pilgrimage site in Poland, and Ballyvourney, the site I visited in Ireland, was that they felt to a certain degree out of time. They each had a rich history and were attached to stories of miracles and of healing, but at certain moments, it felt like I was in a different era altogether. I wanted to capture through photography the apparent collapse of time in front of the camera. I still wanted there to be this sense of mystery and intrigue and of not quite knowing what is going on. As a viewer, you're questioning, who are these people and what are they doing there? I liked the sense of things that are seen yet unseen. You understand there are layers, but you don't fully know what's going on.
I also started to connect with the pilgrims themselves. The portraits within the wider surroundings of the landscapes became very important in my approach. I remember when I told my family I was doing a project about pilgrimage. It puzzled them, but for me, it has always been driven by trying to learn about things that I am not. Not things that I am unaware of, but things that I don't understand. It is longing to feel something when I'm there and longing to understand people's motivations and reasons for being there.
MR: You mentioned that you approached it in a very open-minded way. I think that comes across in the photography. It didn't seem that you had an agenda or a preconceived idea. Can you talk about that? When you approached photographing these communities, you did it in a way that showed respect and also presented the project in a dignified way.
AT: That was very important to me because in a place like Lourdes, it is almost a bit like the Vegas or the Disneyland of the Catholic world. It would be very easy to do quite a mocking take on it. There are six-foot glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary statues, ludicrous trinkets and shops are everywhere, and Ave Maria is playing from a speaker on every street.
You could produce a very different type of photographic project there, but it was very important to me that, although I don't share the faith, I was able to present these people, as you say, in a very sensitive, respectful and dignified way, and somehow through that, capture a sense of their spirituality. That is important to me, whether I'm photographing pilgrims, or as I have more recently, teenagers during the pandemic, and now Italian islanders who have these amazing costumes, masks and rituals.
These are all people who on one level I can't relate to at all, but who I hope I can connect with on a human level, and in that sense this work elevates them. I may not share their views. I may actually, in terms of the pilgrims, disagree with them, but I have an enormous amount of respect for them. I really do hope that comes through, as you said.
MR: What do you feel is important about to your approach to photography? On a critical level, why do you feel it's important to connect with the people on that human level? I know culturally, in our society, there's a lot of division right now. Do you feel that this may bring healing or open up avenues for communication?
AT: Possibly. My photography is never going to change the world. But I was quite struck with the response to Ex-Voto. Many people—who are not religious in any way and would not even call themselves particularly spiritual people—saw something in the images, whether it was the stillness, or the quiet, or that they connected with the gaze of some of the pilgrims. They managed to find something in the images that affected them, whether it was on an emotional level or a visual level.
Not to mention any names, but I am a bit over the exploitative role of the photographer; whether we look back to early anthropology and colonialism, and now even to a lot of contemporary street photography, for instance, it makes me uncomfortable. I find that some photographers are photographing certain people to provoke an extreme reaction. I don't think it is always with the interests of the subjects at heart. My approach is the opposite. I work very carefully and very precisely.
I'm not so sure I would consider my images are meant to be healing, but I hope that they make people perhaps reconsider their opinions or views about certain themes or topics, whether that's tradition or ritual or identity or faith. I'm aware that I'm tackling big themes, but I'm trying to do that in a quieter way. I do hope that people can reflect on these images, even if they don't share the same motivations or beliefs.
MR: So as you enter a new space, a community, and people start to identify you and see what you're working on, and they see whether you are there to be exploitive or are trying to represent things in an appropriate way, how do people react to you? I remember going on your Instagram and seeing a picture of you laughing with a group of nuns. How did they approach you?
AT: For me, it's about building trust, whether that's in a five-minute encounter or a five-year encounter. My approach is quite quiet and quite thoughtful. I'm not a big personality bowling up to people with a camera in their face. People respond very well to the large format camera because they can see that it requires some skill and that it's a craft.
They see that it's a slow and considered way of working. They're also fascinated by the camera as an object because for many people, who aren’t particularly interested in photography, they haven't seen this piece of equipment before, so they are immediately curious to know more. It is easier to begin a dialogue or conversation with them when you've got this huge bellowed thing on your shoulder. People respond to that.
It also depends on the situation. With the picture you saw, I think that was as a result of my photograph. I took a photograph of a nun in Grabarka, in Eastern Poland. It was a portrait of a young Orthodox nun, a very striking young woman with the forest behind, her head covered with the headdress and dressed entirely in black. She was called Vera, and that portrait became one of the most significant photographs of that series.
That led to me making the documentary feature film I’m currently working on about her life in a monastery in Belarus. I feel that my approach is gentle. It's not pushy. When I started Ex-Voto, I would show examples of my photos. If people were unsure whether they wanted to be photographed, I could show them examples and hopefully, they would be able to gauge my approach from that.
For me, a lot of it is about trust. I hope I have a gentle and very respectful approach. But it can also take time. With the monastery in Belarus we (myself and the co-director) were invited initially, and then we kept going back. I think people just really appreciated our commitment as well because we were coming all the way from the UK.
And we were funding it all ourselves. They saw how committed we were to telling these stories. I think people respond very well to being persistent, but I don't think persistent has to mean pushy at all. I think it just shows that this is a project or an idea you really believe in.
For me, whether it's an individual or a community, I treat them in the same way. It's also slow. I don't rush around when I'm photographing or when I'm approaching people or whether I've got ideas for bigger projects. Everything happens at quite a slow pace. I try to be quite patient with it. I understand that some people will change their mind about being photographed. They might say no, and then they might see some images and change their mind, but I would never really persuade someone to be photographed if they didn't want to be photographed.
There is a level of exchange and collaboration that is necessary when you're photographing someone. And that needs to happen between both parties, and it means that I have to be very comfortable and they have to be as comfortable as they can be when they've got a big camera pointed at them. I think a lot of my personality comes through in my image-making really well.
MR: Can you talk a little bit about your latest project.
AT: With Ex-Voto I visited three pilgrimage sites and focused on portraits of the pilgrims, the wider landscapes, and then the ex-voto themselves, which are the little objects of devotion the people leave at the sites. There were still-lifes, landscapes, and portraits. This latest project I'm working on will be published in a book in the fall, probably in October, and will also be published by GOST Books, who published Ex-Voto. There are many overlapping themes. This latest project is about ritual, tradition, identity, and belonging, but it is also about people's connection with their landscapes. This began as a seed of an idea 20 years ago when I was photographing Venice for Time Out , because I used to do a lot of travel photography work.
There is a very beautiful cemetery on the island of San Michele in the Venetian lagoon. Initially I had thought about doing a project about mourning and loss. Through my research that developed into thinking about religious festivals and what they signified. Through that process, I discovered these incredible costumes and masks that are worn throughout Italy for various festivals, but which are particularly important and prominent in the islands of the south and west—so Sicily and Sardinia. I began to visit and document these fascinating and incredible masks and costumes, which all have different stories attached to them, but many of them stem from fables and folklore, and pagan times.
A lot of the themes overlap. Yes, faith is a theme, but also there are others: man, the land, good and evil, and the cycles of life and the different seasons. They all represent different elements in the lives of the locals. All the costumes are worn by local villagers who dress up in a very, very proud way. They're all handmade. Many were made by grandparents and have been passed down through the family. It's a very big event when they put them on and take on their embodied characters.
The portraits are quite different from Ex-Voto, and a lot of them are much more performative. They're less austere and a little bit more playful on the surface, but then some of them have a much darker side.
MR: Have you ever made the connection between this tradition in Italy with ceremonial costumes in Africa? With African costumes, they appear very traditional, but the rituals and the costumes are still used today.
AT: In doing this work, I researched people who have photograph costumes. For instance, I've got a book by Leah Gordon who has photographed—I think it was—in Haiti, and I started finding a lot of work that had been made about African rituals and African costumes. The Italian costumes have the same tradition and many of them do date back, or the stories the traditions attach to, date back hundreds of years. What is difficult, and I don't know if this is the same with African traditions because I don't know enough about them, is that it's very hard to pin down exactly the origin of many of these Italian festivals and rituals.
You may go to one tiny village and someone will say, "This is all for a feast of San Antonio, and it's all about the connection with animals and the land." Someone else will say, "No, it's not. It's about the redemption and about us protecting our land." There are contentious layers that come together. It's very difficult to know the precise reason they started and the precise origin of these rituals because no one exactly agrees. I think the more you look into it, you realize that actually, throughout the world, in Europe, in Africa, these are traditions that have been maintained, often for hundreds of years, and they are incredibly important to those communities. I think that's partly why I like working in the way I do. Working in this large-format in black and white, I like the ambiguity of not knowing whether this photograph was taken in 2022 or 1922.
There is a sense of not being able to pin down the era, and that is something I'm aware of. When I'm taking photographs for this new series, I am very careful, as I was for Ex-Voto, that there are no signs of modernity in my frame and my composition. I like that feeling of having stepped back in time, but I suppose that from a personal point of view, I felt more comfortable in Europe doing this kind of project. I think with my anthropological training now, I would have to justify in some way making this kind of work in Africa.
MR: What is the history of your relationship with GOST Books and how has that progressed? You produced your first book with them in 2019, and they will be publishing your new book this year. How have they supported you with these book projects? Do you expect to produce more work with them in the future?
AT: I have always liked the breadth of work that GOST Books has published. I very much admire the design, which is done by Stu Smith, who runs GOST. Each of their books has a certain style, but at the same time, they are very distinct. There isn't a template that is rolled out for each book. I also appreciate their sensitivity towards each body of work. When Ex-Voto looked like it was nearing completion, I got in touch with Stu through a friend. I had met him a few times, and when I began to show him the work, he was interested in publishing it.
That was the first book, and that was very exciting because it was my first proper monograph. Then I self-published Lost Summer, which was about teenagers who'd had their proms canceled due to COVID. I was able to self-publish because it was a smaller, less complicated book. That worked out quite well, but this one feels different. Although it is not a complex book in some ways, at the same time, it feels like a bigger body of work.
I wanted to work with GOST Books because of course there are benefits working with publishers. They go to the photo fairs and have distribution networks, for example. Stu is extremely good at sequencing the work. He identified ideas in the work and narratives threads that I hadn't really considered before—and without making it off the wall or overcomplicated. I think the sequence has a very nice flow, and perhaps that wouldn’t have happened had I been doing it myself?
The downside was that I had to do Kickstarters for both books, which is unfortunately the pervasive model in the independent publishing world at the moment. Basically the photographer has to cover many of the costs through presales because there isn't much money in photo book publishing. Many of the smaller publishers don't want to take any risks. They want to know that they're not going to take a loss on your work. That is not a model that I support or that I think is very healthy for the industry, but unfortunately, it's commonplace now. I hope that I'll work with GOST in the future. I don't know if I will do any more publications in the future, but I would definitely like to continue to work with them and to have it be something that develops over many years.
MR: Even considering the photo book publishing environment now, there is a clear benefit to using an established brand publishing company versus self-publishing.
AT: This feels like a bigger project to me. Obviously, when you're self-publishing, you're doing everything yourself; you're doing the marketing, the press, the distribution, the postage and packaging, and running an online bookshop. It's a lot of work. With the additional work that publishers do aside from the design and printing, I felt that they would do a much better job with their dedicated press person.
The book will launch—I hope—at Paris Photo. They'll take it to Photo London, the AIPAD, and to the big fairs. They are able to reach an audience that is just not possible for me to reach on my own. But there are a lot of photographers who very successfully self-publish, and they've got their own very good model. For me, with this latest book, I instinctively felt that GOST was the right way forward.
MR: What are you doing currently?
AT: I've already mentioned this, but the documentary feature film I'm working on, which is supported by Sundance, is something that's very current at the moment because we're at the rough cut stage. That's been much more collaborative. That's been a different experience for me because I'm so used to working completely on my own.
Working as part of a team and co-directing, and almost relinquishing some control, has been challenging on some level, but it has also been a very enriching experience on another level.
That's very current and what I'm thinking about a lot at the moment. Gli Isolani, which translates as The Islanders, is the Italian book that will be out in the fall. An exhibition of the work will open in September at HackelBury Fine Art in London. That's mainly what I'm working on at the moment.
MR: Will the film be at Sundance?
AT: It's been supported by Sundance. We would love to get it into Sundance, but we don't know yet. That's ambitious, but we will be submitting it. The deadline isn't until November or December, but they supported us. They gave us some money for filming and production and development. All of that came out of one image. That was very surprising because, although I had a great interest in film, I'd never considered or thought I would ever make a film. That was quite surprising, but it came out of this rather serendipitous encounter with this incredible nun Vera. It was just too good an opportunity to not pursue.
MR: It's remarkable that one photograph created this whole other project.
AT: It's really allowed my artistic practice to develop. I now think about storytelling in a different way because making a film is a very different process. Although there are overlaps, it is very different from working on a photography project. It has forced me to think in a different way about visual language and narrative structure. It has been very good for me, but also hard at times as well.
MR: Do you think that you had initially approached the still photography was looking back to a cinematic approach?
AT: Perhaps on a subconscious level, but I don't think I set out that way. I don't use loads of lights; I only photograph with available light. It's not cinematic in that sense, but I certainly think in terms of the framing composition, I've been as influenced by film as I have been by still photography.
Many film directors also work in photography; there is crossover. There are many scenes from my film Vera that look like they could be photographs. There is obviously some movement, but the style, composition, framing and the stillness are all very much based on Ex-Voto. Visually and aesthetically, it functions like an expansion of Ex-Voto.
—
New book on sale at https://gostbooks.com/product/gli-isolani-the-islanders/.
Exhibition on view through October 29th at https://hackelbury.co.uk/.
—
Visit her website for updates at http://www.alystomlinson.co.uk/.