Alys Tomlinson
British photographer
Alys Tomlinson (born 1975) is a British photographer. She has published the books Following Broadway (2013), Ex-Voto (2019), Lost Summer (2020) and Gli Isolani (The Islanders) (2022). For Ex-Voto she won the Photographer of the Year award at the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards. Portraits from Lost Summer won First prize in the 2020 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.
Life and work
Tomlinson was born and grew up in Brighton, UK. She studied English, literature and communications at the University of Leeds. After graduating in the mid-1990s, she moved to New York City for a year, where she undertook her first commission as a photographer, shooting all the pictures for the Time Out Guide to the city. She returned to London to study photography at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and later completed a part-time MA in anthropology of travel, tourism and pilgrimage at SOAS University of London.
During each of several later trips to New York City over four years, she walked the 14 mile length of Broadway, first in full taking 10 hours then in sections, and making street portraits. This resulted in the book Following Broadway (2013).
Tomlinson's book Ex-Voto (2019) is about ex-voto (votive offerings made to a saint or to a divinity) left at several European destinations of Christian pilgrimage: the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, France; Ballyvourney, Ireland; and the Grabarka Holy Mount in Podlaskie Voivodeship, Poland, close to the border with Belarus.
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