Following the longest butterfly migration in the world, Lucas Foglia’s book “Constant Bloom” is his latest exploration of the relationship between people and nature. Seventy photographs inside a casing of violet paper, each end embossed with a wing, one belonging to a young butterfly, the other disintegrated with age, show the route flown by Painted Ladies. While charting the butterflies’ travels through Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Foglia also captures the afflictions and triumphs of humans whose lives are separated by oceans. Their faces, accompanied by the resilience of paper-winged creatures who alter their migration in response to climate change, evidence peoples’ confrontation of challenges that transcend land borders.
Unfolding sequentially, “Constant Bloom” progresses with the Painted Ladies on their 9,400 mile round-trip across the world. Beginning in Kenya and traveling north across Africa, the butterflies make their way to Tunisia, then linger in Spain and France, before flying east into many European countries, including Switzerland, Romania, and Germany. After finding them in Norway, the butterflies’ northernmost destination, the book shadows their return to Africa.
This staggering array of places is bound together by Foglia’s image sequence, which imitates nature’s cycles. His opening photograph, for instance, depicts a caterpillar chrysalis hanging from a thorn in Kenya, while the closing page returns to Africa where a single severed wing lies beside a newborn caterpillar in Morocco. According to The Scientists of the Worldwide Painted Lady Migration Project, the butterflies live for only five weeks. After flying 2,500 miles, their wings begin to deteriorate. It takes up to ten generations of Painted Ladies to complete the entire migratory route. Nature’s stubborn resilience shows up plainly in the meeting of failed wings with rebirth that appears in “Constant Bloom”. Ladies tattered by exertion rest in museums and research institutes, while their children flit through open skies on subsequent pages. Foglia’s commitment to repeatedly evidencing life and death suggests that nature’s cyclical determination will carry its creatures through any storm, human-made, or not.
Foglia’s book, like the winged Ladies, moves through countries as though borders don’t exist. In a photograph taken in Kenya, two men stand on a boulder that defies gravity by protruding sideways into the open sky. One man holds a long brown net. The other clutches a poised gun. Collecting butterflies as children would in a backyard, they face unknown danger. At issue in “Constant Bloom” is far more than an examination of beauty. Across the Red Sea, a Jordanian tour guide named Mohammad overlooks a desert marked by half-constructed buildings. With a white net slung over his shoulder, he is part of the same narrative as the men in Kenya, although they exist in markedly different biomes.
Foglia’s landscapes and portraits take on the same formal and textural qualities as the butterflies who frequent them. A boy in Italy, for example, jubilantly draws lines of ash across his face. On the next page, a butterfly’s intricately lined wings outstretch to form the same triangle as the boy’s arms do. In “Constant Bloom” humans are a part of nature, which is not confined by the country lines that often convince people they exist separately from problems afflicting others. Readers are encouraged to consider, then, whether borders truly separate us.
As human industries expand, Painted Ladies are forced to explore roadways and settlements where wildflowers grow. As the climate warms, their migration elongates further North, to places like Norway. These sudden alterations to an ancient route encouraged Foglia to include portraits of people whose lives are also reshaped by climate change. In one image, a tired man in France stands outside his house on a front step. The other steps are concealed in murky water, which submerges his yard after a flash flood. In the Netherlands, Foglia photographs a Dutch farmers’ protest against climate change mitigation, juxtaposed later with an intimate portrait of a Norwegian father clutching his daughter. “Constant Bloom” does not ignore disaster, but it resists focusing purely on what is lost. In France, the Painted Ladies feast in a haven of lavender farms planted by humans. In Romania, organic farms act as essential resting places. By showing what still exists and what stands to be lost, Foglia provides a reason to engage in the struggle to save this magnificent planet.
During Foglia’s pursuit of the Painted Ladies, he discovered that their routes often coincide with those of refugees immigrating to new lands. In Tunisia, three teenagers overlook a vast landscape where sea becomes sky. To convey the gravity of this image after letting viewers puzzle over it themselves, Foglia includes an index of captions, translated in English, French, and Arabic, at the back of the book. He writes that these boys emigrated by boat to Italy soon after the photograph was taken. On the next page, an aerial shot depicts a ship gliding away from a miniaturized island. It’s captioned as “the Central Mediterranean Passage”, or the deadliest migration route for humans. When the boys arrived safely from its passage, they called Foglia to ask whether the butterflies also landed safely. Through frank sentences such as these, a clear metaphor between human and nature is established. Our shared capacity to endure brutal conditions and emerge to continue on, with mindful regard for others, ingrains the pages of “Constant Bloom” with hope.
An exhaustive depiction of unseen relationships in our current world, “Constant Bloom” manages to intertwine seemingly opposing elements: nature with human, disaster with creation, captivity with freedom, and anguish with exhilaration. By showing two sides of every story, Foglia’s work transcends pure documentation to become a poetic narrative that depicts people on opposite sides of the globe through their shared responsibilities. Readers are reminded that human actions are met with those of nature, constant in its instinct to keep moving forward.