Where the wild things are: Alys Tomlinson’s portraits of island traditions

Excerpt from theguardian.com

In 2007, while Alys Tomlinson was photographing in Venice for a tourist travel guidebook, she took a vaporetto across the lagoon to the cemetery island of San Michele. “It was a crisp, misty morning,” she recalls, “and there were groups of black-clad mourners on the decks, many of them carrying flowers to lay on the graves of their loved ones.”

The image stayed with her and, having researched the history of the island, she returned, intent on making a project about them. Things did not turn out as planned. “It was just so difficult to ask people who were in different stages of grief and vulnerability if I could photograph them, so much so that I began to question not just my original idea but my integrity.”

Out of that moment of self-doubt grew another, very different idea, which has come to fruition 15 years later. Initially, Tomlinson turned her attention to the religious festivals that take place in Venice during Holy Week and on saints’ days but her curiosity was steadily drawn to more remote places where the ritual celebrations were more atavistic and mysterious. Most of the portraits and landscapes that comprise Gli Isolani (The Islanders), her new book, and exhibition, were made in the mountainous towns and villages of Sardinia and Sicily, where the participants often don animal hides and grotesque masks as they parade though the streets. Their costumes hark back centuries to the fantastical creatures of local fairytales and further back still to pre-Christian rituals that marked the changing of the seasons or acknowledged the power of the natural landscape and the animals therein – oxen, stags and devilish goats.