A Morning of Cherry Blossoms

In March 2023, for the first time in my life, went to spend a Saturday morning at the Tidal Basin to enjoy the Cherry Blossom bloom and take some street/documentary photos.

I wasn’t there very long, as a DMV native I’ve spent most of my Springs learning to keep away from the Cherry Blossoms, as it is the busiest time of year (anecdotally, at least) for tourists. I read a story about a tourist climbing and breaking a Cherry Blossom tree, and for some reason, it really jarred me that someone would come to a place known for its beautiful trees and try to climb one. It made me really curious to document how tourists would interact with this environment.

The whole downtown area of the City was swarming as expected. It actually was the morning of the Cherry Blossom 5k, but I didn’t quite wake up early enough to catch most of the racers. There were, however, plenty of people already out visiting the Tidal Basin.

I started out by just doing a lap getting a feel for the area. I felt myself drawn to the. more popular areas where there were more subjects to work with. The first thing I noticed was the photos. Not my photos, but everyone else’s, as virtually every single person was taking pictures with their phones or DSLRs. Photos of kids, spouses, selfies, professional portraits, close-up flower shots, everyone I pointed my camera at was, in turn, pointing their camera at something else.

For some reason this really stood out to me. Despite never having cared enough about the Cherry Blossoms to have visited them before, I felt slightly offended that so many people would witness such a natural beauty through the screen of their phones. Sure I look through a viewfinder too, but mine is a mirror and a lens, not a bunch of megapixels on a mini-computer. When I’m not photographing I put my camera down and just watch, I like to see things with my own eyes as much as possible, but I seemed to be the only one who just took them in. I think in my head I took it as tourists only seeing the landscape’s beauty as a photo op to share on Facebook or Instagram, which seems like a much more pointless use of time than actually looking at the trees themselves, but I digress.

You’ll notice I tried to focus on the underlying theme of people focusing on their phones and taking photos throughout my photo set.