Lucas Foglia ’05 has long photographed people in their natural environment. His new book, tracing the epic migration of the painted lady butterfly from Africa to Norway, turns the lens around. “I wanted to photograph people from the perspective of nature,” says Foglia. He read about the world’s longest butterfly migration—9,000 miles round-trip—during COVID, and set out to document it as soon as it was safe to travel in spring 2021. The journey took him four years following Painted Lady butterflies across 17 countries, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and resulting in the exhibition and book Constant Bloom as a hopeful vision of cross-border connection. “I wanted to show how our backyards are connected literally and figuratively to lands far away we may never see.”
Foglia grew up on a farm on Long Island, where his parents, a folklorist and an environmental educator, filled him with stories of connection to the land. At Brown, he studied a mix of environmental history, semiotics, art, and poetry. For his thesis, he photographed members of the community gardens at South Side Community Land Trust—many of them immigrants and refugees—and displayed the photos at Providence City Hall. “The experience changed how I think about my place as an artist in the world,” he says. “I care about the craft of photographs, but also about their purpose, as a medium that connects people.”
For the butterfly project, he learned to find butterflies by asking locals where they went on dates to watch the sunset. “Butterflies look for the high point in the landscape to court each other,” he says. “So wherever people go on dates, I’d find butterflies on dates as well.” Foglia met a group of teenagers on the coast of Tunisia. One of them later contacted him after crossing to Italy as a migrant worker, asking for help—and if the butterflies had made it. As Foglia realized people were migrating along the same routes, he began photographing them too, donating photographs to refugee resettlement groups to use in their advocacy.
The book shows how people and insects are intimately connected across continents. Foglia sees symbolism in the fact that it takes generations of butterflies to complete the full-circle trip. “A Painted Lady starts when its wings are bright and flies until they tear or fray. A lot of us are feeling pretty frayed right now, but it’s not too late to address the urgent issues of our time—and inspire the next generation to continue beyond us.”
