For two years Alys Tomlinson photographed festivals and celebrations on the islands of the Venetian lagoon, Sicily and Sardinia, where costumes and masks have been handed down through generations. The resulting book, Gli Isolani (The Islanders), published by GOST Books in 2022, occupies a hinterland between fiction and reality: the elaborate, sometimes uncanny disguises worn for Holy Week and other events are sometimes inspired by pagan ritual and belief, and by the old tales that bind communities to their land. Tomlinson worked with a large-format 5×4 camera, and the black-and-white photographs carry the visual language of her earlier projects, lending the scenes a timeless, almost suspended quality. Crumbling stone walls and rural fields frame figures whose gestures evoke the sacred and the profane, good and evil, without resolving the tension between them.
The project began with research into the literature and poetry connected to the islands’ history and culture, an engagement with tradition and identity that shapes how the pictures are made and sequenced. The photographs appear here in book form for the first time, following an exhibition at Hacklebury Fine Art, London, from 7 September to 29 October 2022. The clothbound volume runs to 118 pages and includes a foldout, giving the sequence room to move between individual portraits and the wider settings that give them meaning.
Gli Isolani extends Tomlinson’s long-standing interest in ritual, belief and the traces of myth in contemporary life, but it does so through a specific geography and a closely observed set of communities. The result is a body of work that is both documentary and quietly theatrical, and a book that rewards repeated looking.
