Alys Tomlinson is a British editorial and fine art documentary photographer, born in Brighton in 1975 and based in London. She studied English Literature and Communications at the University of Leeds, got her first commission in New York for Time Out, and then studied photography at Central Saint Martins. She later completed an MA in the Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage at SOAS, University of London.
Her series Ex-Voto, made over five years at Catholic pilgrimage sites in Ireland, Poland and France, won the overall Photographer of the Year award at the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards and was published by GOST Books in 2019. Lost Summer (self-published, 2020) shows teenagers dressed for proms that never happened, and its portraits won the 2020 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. Her short film Vera won the Public Prize of the New Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2019.
For Gli Isolani (The Islanders) (GOST Books, 2022) she spent two years photographing ritual, costume and tradition on islands of the Venetian lagoon, Sicily and Sardinia, working with a large-format 5x4 camera on black-and-white film, as she did for her previous two projects.
