"For Alys Tomlinson, portraiture has always been a slow, traditional and deliberate exchange that resists spectacle. Her contribution to The Bodleian Libraries Commission, a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and the British Journal of Photography that seeks to diversify the Bodleian’s historic portrait collection, reflects this ethos.
Responding to the commission theme, Catalysts, Tomlinson created a series of diptychs depicting six Oxford academics whose research shifts understanding in fields ranging from mental health to Islamic art, reproductive science and mathematical biology. Rather than meet her subjects in lecture halls or offices, she removed them from traditional academic settings and placed them in natural surroundings. “I wanted to photograph the subjects in more intimate and reflective moments,” she explains."
