There is a particular kind of magic to Sicily: a place where the everyday can feel theatrical, where beauty is rarely too polished and where even the most fleeting encounter seems to tell a story. At Villa Sant’Andrea, on the pebbled shores of Mazzarò Bay, photographer and filmmaker Tara L. C. Sood finds a world perfectly poised between reality and reverie.
Born in France to a Punjabi family, Sood attended boarding school in the Himalayas and went on to study performance art at Central Saint Martins in London. Now based between London, Paris and India, she has developed a distinctive visual language that draws on characterful encounters and the art of the unexpected. Her photographs inhabit the space between documentary and dreamscape: real people, caught in moments that feel almost too improbable to be true.
In 2026, Sood was named the winner of the Belmond Photographic Residency 2026, an initiative celebrating photographers who bring fresh perspectives to the places and stories behind travel. Her residency at Villa Sant’Andrea gave her a carte blanche to explore Taormina and its surroundings, resulting in a new body of work published with Parisian art-book publisher RVB Books.
The setting of Taormina has a cinematic history of its own. Completed in 1919 as a private seaside residence for the Trewhella family, the villa later became a hotel, welcoming generations of guests drawn to Taormina’s sea-splashed glamour. It is here where Al Pacino ate spaghetti while filming The Godfather, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor fell out and made up and Rudolph Nureyev reclined between ballet productions. Today, the same stretch of coast offers a different kind of spectacle: the shimmer of the Ionian Sea, the steep green slopes above the bay and the small dramas of life unfolding at the water’s edge.
It is this interplay between place and personality that makes Sood’s vision so fitting. Rather than reaching for the familiar postcard image of Sicily, she turns her attention to its wonderfully idiosyncratic details. Her photographs feel less like a record of a destination than an invitation into its private mythology; a world in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary simply by being seen.
Consider the slightly grizzled Chihuahua, all character and quiet authority, sitting beneath an oversized umbrella patterned with swirling navy-and-yellow motifs reminiscent of Sicilian ceramics. Elsewhere, a scuba diver stands fully equipped on the sand of Mazzarò Bay, his olive-green wetsuit, octopus regulator and pressure gauge lending an almost science-fiction quality to the simplicity of the shoreline.
Other encounters unfold with the delicious ambiguity of scenes from an undiscovered film. Two police officers are caught in animated conversation; a market stall overflows with ripe pomegranates; a man bears an uncanny resemblance to his beloved dog. Sculpted cherubs appear suspended in mid-revelry, as though the figures of a baroque imagination have slipped into the real world. Each image offers a small mystery, leaving just enough unsaid for the viewer to invent a story of their own.
Perhaps that is the secret of seeing Sicily through Sood’s eyes. The island is not reduced to a single idea of itself, nor arranged into a succession of perfect views. Instead, it emerges as a place of contrasts and happy contradictions, where ancient forms meet modern life, where elegance accommodates eccentricity and where the most memorable moments often happen beyond the frame.
