The Islanders

Gli Isolani (The Islanders) is the latest project by the British photographer Alys Tomlinson. The project documents traditional costumes and masks worn during the festivities and celebrations on the islands of the Venetian lagoon, in Sicily and Sardinia. For two years, Alys photographed locals dressed in costumes inspired by paganism, fables and folklore. Working again on film with a large format plate camera, the images evoke a timeless quality and invite us to enter a world mysterious of good and evil, of the sacred and the profane. Against a backdrop of rural fields and ruined stones, many portraits appear as characters that we may have encountered in our own imagination, while the The boundaries between fiction and reality are blurring.