A Photographic Life-396: 'APL LIVE 2025' with Photographer and Filmmaker Alys Tomlinson

In this special episode recorded at our A Photographic Life Live 2025 event at Oxford Brookes University Grant speaks with photographer and filmmaker focusing on her dedication to the long form project, her film Mother Vera and the the need for dedicated research when building a body of work. Alys Tomlinson Tomlinson was born and grew up in Brighton, UK and 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 the 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) documents 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. Tomlinson's film Mother Vera, accompanies her Ex-Voto work. https://www.motherverafilm.co.uk Lost Summer (2020) is a book of black and white portraits of young people aged between 15 and 19 in north London. With the cancellation of final exams and ritual events such as proms and graduations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tomlinson photographed her subjects in the outfits they would have worn to prom, in their gardens and local parks. Her latest project Gli Isolani (The Islanders) was published by GOST Books in 2022. Alys’s work is collected privately and is in the following collections: National Portrait Gallery (London), The Rencontres d’Arles Collection, The Bodleian Library, AmberSide Collection. https://alystomlinson.co.uk Dr.Grant Scott After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work zas a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018. Scott’s next book is Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is on sale February 2024. Image: Vera by Alys Tomlinson © Grant Scott 2025