Gli Isolani (‘The Islanders’) is the latest series by award-winning photographer Alys Tomlinson – the beguiling product of her frequent visits to Italy during 2020-2021 where she found inspiration in the litany of festivals and traditions that take place on the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and the Venetian lagoon every year.
With their provenance in ancient pagan rituals and beliefs, the project features portraits of individuals in animalistic or humanoid masks and other elaborate paraphernalia, juxtaposed with enigmatic, elemental landscape images to uncanny effect. Recently exhibited at London’s HackelBury Fine Art gallery, the entirety of this compelling project can now be pre-ordered as a book from publishers GOST.
Over the course of two years, Tomlinson travelled to numerous towns and villages across Italy to take portraits of individuals wearing traditional, highly symbolic and intricately-made costumes – often passed down from generation to generation – whose relevance is intimately connected to the regions’ cultural heritage. Subsequently, they’re a source of great pride to those who wear them.
Leafing through Tomlinson’s 118-page book – a cornucopia of vividly realised monochrome images – we’re transported to a geographically hazy place of rugged coastlines, wild rural environs, and time-worn cobblestone streets, whose landscapes are populated by a brooding cast of fantastical characters.
I Diavoli, Prizzi, 2020; Courtesy of HackelBury Fine Art
We survey horned devils beckoning to us; saints and sinners bedecked in black standing against crumbling brick walls; a litany of demons, rogues, and bestial men cloaked in sheep skins, whose earnest gazes apprehend our own and who appear somewhat sinister despite their pastoral setting.
The roots of these mythological figures are embedded in eras long before our own secular, post-industrial age, and whose attire and ceremonial rites are variously informed by Christianity, the customs of the medieval carnival, and ancient propitiatory rites used to appease pagan deities. Some even stretch back to the Neolithic age about 6000 years ago.
Gli Isolani illustrates these festivals’ heady mix of cultural influences. Tomlinson’s Sa Filonzana, Ottana, for example, depicts a descendent of the figure Clotho, one of the three goddesses of fate in Ancient Greece. She’s shown hunched over a spindle of wool unravelling the thread of life and armed with scissors to cut it, obscured beneath an anthropomorphic mask and heavy black shawl.
Meanwhile, the hardship of peasant life is reflected in the matted sheepskin costumes and gloomy demeanours of Sos Merdules, photographed standing astride the rocky ground, also in the Sardinian municipality of Ottana.
Sos Merdules, Ottana, Sardinia, 2021; Courtesy of HackelBury Fine Art
During the city-wide celebrations of Settimana Santa or Holy Week, they can be found locked in a struggle with the elegant bull-like figure of Su Boe, where they restrain it with a leather whip called a soca. It’s a performance that conveys the visceral, almost sacred connection between farmers and their livestock in former agro-pastoral societies.
Each island has its own, regionally-specific traditions. Over in Sicily in the mountain town of Prizzi, the Diavolo (devils) try to prevent the coming together of statues of the risen Christ and the Virgin Mary in the carnival procession but are finally overcome by people dressed as angels.
The I Giudei of San Fratello, meanwhile, express an equally irreverent, anti-establishment attitude. Sporting exuberantly colourful costumes, a tied-on horses tail and lolling leather tongue, they go around noisily disrupting religious activity with trumpets and chains until the Easter procession gets underway.
I Giudei, San Fratello, 2020; Courtesy of HackelBury Fine Art
Unfortunately, capturing this aspect of Italy’s Easter festivals became unfeasible for Tomlinson, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The initial plan was to photograph people during La Pasqua [Italian Easter]” she said, “when the spirit of Italian culture and mythology comes alive through celebrations across the country.” But with Covid heralding worldwide lockdowns in 2020 and local authorities enforcing social distancing measures, she was forced to take a different approach.
In lieu of the choreographed chaos that typically occupies each region during Holy Week, Tomlinson arranged photoshoots of individuals and small groups dressed in their traditional garb within anonymous, rather isolated settings. Her images are wistful, brooding, and compellingly eerie rather than rambunctious: channelling a bygone age of shadowy rites, superstitious beliefs, and the fraught relationship between ancient agricultural societies and the land.
Issohadore, Mamoiada, 2021; Courtesy of HackelBury Fine Art
Adopting the signature aesthetic she employed to award-winning effect in her earlier series Ex-Voto (2016-2018) and Lost Summer (2022), Tomlinson captured these images using a large format 5×4 analogue camera with black and white sheet film. This result is a profusion of richly detailed, immersive images that brilliantly render the subtleties of light and dark in atmospheric scenes of radiant gloom.
It’s a visual approach that also imposes spatial coherence on different geographic locations across Venice, Sardinia and Sicily, while doing nothing to dispel the temporal confusion of Tomlinson’s world, which, if not quite ‘timeless’, invokes a vague, anachronistic sense of the past: of strict religious observances, pre-modern pagan belief, and Neolithic cults.
The ambiguity of the work – visual, thematic, and spatio-temporal – engenders an otherworldly quality that we might term liminality. Conceptualised by 20th century British anthropologist Victor Turner as “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage”, its applications have since broadened to encompass all manner of social, political, and cultural phenomena. But central to its understanding is the notion of being on a threshold between two different planes of experience.
Su Beccue Su Aprarzu, Ollolai, 2021; Courtesy of HackelBury Fine Art
Both emerging out of the unforeseen circumstances of Covid-19, Tomlinson’s two most recent projects might just be liminality personified. As the pandemic ushered global communities towards a frightening and radically altered future, she turned her camera on school leavers in her north London neighbourhood for Lost Summer. With proms cancelled during lockdown, she took the portraits of young men and women otherwise unable to mark this momentous transition into early adulthood.
Also emerging from this globally shared liminal moment – a “discontinuity in the social fabric characterised by separation from everyday life and society” – was Gli Isolani. The anonymously located, decontextualised images here feel so masterfully porous – positioning us on the precipice between past and present, the real and the mythical, and Christian and pagan worlds – that one gets the impression you could pass right through into any of these photographs.
Tomlinson immerses us further still by blurring the line between documentary objectivity and performativity, in a manner more pronounced than any of her previous work. The high-resolution detail of her large format camera presents these arcane costumes and masked characters with graphic realism, while conversely she obscures the specificity of the time and place we’re observing.
This dislocation is heightened in images that combine backdrops shot in hazy soft focus, while her strange subjects – representations of both people and personae – are pictured in sharp relief. From beyond, these unfathomable beings beckon for us to join them.