In Bloom

Photographer Lisa Toboz contemplates springtime cherry blossoms and how they remind us of time and beauty’s precariousness.

In spring 2020, when the pandemic lockdown began, I wanted to capture on Polaroid film my apple tree blossoming in real-time, but the flowers bloomed for only one week. This left me driving out to Neville Island, where my sister lives on a quiet cul-de-sac along the Ohio River. In her backyard a cherry tree blooms frothy pink tufts of delicious petals which end up covering the grass more than the tree branches. I lucked out with one large branch that had fallen to the ground from a previous day’s storm, placed it carefully in the trunk of my car, and hoped it would survive the pothole-filled ride home.

Hanami is the Japanese custom of enjoying sakura, or cherry blossoms––a contemplative way to celebrate the end of winter and spring’s onset. The act of photography––particularly when using Polaroid film––is also meditative. There are only eight frames in a Polaroid pack, so every shot counts. The film is often finicky, with chemical trails and color shifts, and like nature, imperfect: using it as my primary artistic medium taught me to let go and welcome the unknown. The Spectra film that I used to document life in the COVID-era is discontinued, so each shot is precious, a reminder that once it’s gone, it’s gone, much like the blossoms that I aimed to capture on film.

It all sounds like a big hassle to get a few shots of a bunch of flowers, but such is the life of an artist: we are always chasing that which provides us escape and joy, something that connects us more deeply to the world. My bedroom-turned studio ended up covered in pink “snow” that stuck to my shoes and clung to my hair–– petals caught in book pages, the cat’s fur, scattered across sheets. It created a mess, a beautiful mess that taught me how to embrace time’s precariousness, and that the journey is just as important as the destination. lisatoboz.com