In 2007, while Alys Tomlinson was photographing in Venice for a tourist travel guidebook, she took a vaporetto across the lagoon to the cemetery island of San Michele. “It was a crisp, misty morning,” she recalls, “and there were groups of black-clad mourners on the decks, many of them carrying flowers to lay on the graves of their loved ones.”
The image stayed with her and, having researched the history of the island, she returned, intent on making a project about them. Things did not turn out as planned. “It was just so difficult to ask people who were in different stages of grief and vulnerability if I could photograph them, so much so that I began to question not just my original idea but my integrity.”
