Alys Tomlinson and Liz Hingley: Projects and Photographic Approaches

Alys Tomlinson and Liz Hingley both photograph religious life, and both arrived at it from study rather than from news. Tomlinson spent about five years at Catholic and Orthodox pilgrimage sites for Ex-Voto. Hingley trained as an anthropologist and has worked along a single Birmingham road, in Shanghai and in the Middle East. The two shared a London talk programme on 9 April 2019.

Alys Tomlinson

Alys Tomlinson is a British photographer based in London. Her website lists Mother Vera, Gli Isolani (The Islanders), Lost Summer and Ex-Voto among her projects.

Ex-Voto and the 2018 award

The Sony World Photography Awards named Tomlinson Photographer of the Year in 2018 for Ex-Voto. The organisers' announcement of the overall winners states that the title carried a prize of $25,000 and that she was chosen from the ten category winners of the Professional competition.

Ex-Voto was photographed at three pilgrimage sites: Lourdes in France, Ballyvourney in Ireland and Grabarka in Poland. The series mixes formal portraits of pilgrims, large-format landscapes of the sites and still lifes of the votive offerings left there, the ex-votos that give the work its title. All of it was shot on large format film in black and white.

The work continued after the award. GOST Books published Ex-Voto as a crowdfunded book in 2019, with essays by Sean O'Hagan, Professor John Eade and Dr Rowan Cerys Tomlinson. Tomlinson also received a Sony Professional Grant, which funded a follow-on project about a nun she had met while making the series, work that became Mother Vera. She is represented by HackelBury Fine Art in London, where Ex-Voto was shown in spring 2019.

Liz Hingley

Liz Hingley works as both a photographer and an anthropologist, and her site presents the two roles together. Her projects include Under Gods, Sacred Shanghai, The Jones Family, End of Lines and Home Made in Smethwick.

Under Gods

Under Gods: Stories from the Soho Road documents the faith communities along a two-mile stretch of the Soho Road in Birmingham, where Hingley grew up. The Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant gave the project a Highly Commended award in 2010 and records that it was made between 2007 and 2009, among Buddhists, Rastafarians, Sikhs, Catholic nuns and Hare Krishnas on the same road. Dewi Lewis published the book in 2011, and the work also travelled as an exhibition.

Her later work moved outward from Birmingham without changing the method. Sacred Shanghai applies the same attention to religious practice in a Chinese city. Home Made in Smethwick approaches a West Midlands town through food, pairing portraits with handwritten recipes. The Jones Family, a long study of one family, received support from Photophilanthropy, the Prix Virginia and a Getty editorial grant.

Photographing belief without trespassing on it

Both practices raise the same practical problem. A pilgrimage site or a place of worship is a working space for the people in it, not a location. Several things distinguish the careful approach from the extractive one.

• Time before frames. Five years at three sites, or two years on one road, produces a different relationship than a weekend visit. Repeat presence is what makes a portrait sitting possible at all.
• A declared frame. Tomlinson photographs the objects people leave rather than the moment of prayer, which keeps the work on the evidence of devotion instead of on devotion itself.
• Slow technique. You cannot work unnoticed with a view camera, so large format film turns the portrait into something the subject has agreed to.

Documentary work on faith communities in Britain has often been commissioned around an anniversary and then dropped. Both projects here carried on past the funding moment, which is why both have books behind them rather than only exhibitions.

For other photographers working on long-form documentary subjects, see our speakers index and the previous talks archive. The full set of profile pages is in the events archive.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, with its venue, or with the photographers written about here. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked above.