Lucas Foglia (born 1983) is an American photographer, living in San Francisco. [1] [2] "His work is concerned mainly with documenting people and their relationship to nature", for which he has travelled extensively making landscape photography and portraiture. [3]
Foglia's Human Nature has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago [4] and at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. [5] His work is held in the collections of Denver Art Museum, [6] MoCP, [7] Philadelphia Museum of Art [8] and Portland Art Museum. [9]
Foglia was born on Long Island, New York. [1] His parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement and he grew up on their farm, 30 miles from Manhattan. [10] He received his BA from Brown University in 2005 [11] and received his MFA from Yale School of Art, at Yale University, Connecticut in 2010. [1] [2]
Foglia's first two books A Natural Order (2012) and Frontcountry (2014) merge landscape photography and portraiture. [12] According to Sean O'Hagan in The Guardian, the portraits in those books and in Human Nature (2017), "occupy that tricky, slightly heightened hinterland between documentary and staging." [13]
A Natural Order "looked at people who lived off the grid in the American backwoods – drifters, Christian communities, back-to-the-land hippies, survivalists". [12] It was made over five years and several long trips south in a camper van. [10]
Frontcountry is a book of two halves, depicting the contrast between the contradictory lifestyles of ranching and mining in the contemporary American West. It was made between 2006 and 2013 in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming. [12]
Human Nature is "a series of vignettes about the relationship science, government, and individuals have with wilderness and nature." [14]
Summer After (2021) contains black and white portraits of people that Foglia met on the street in New York City in 2002 in the wake of the September 11 attacks, after he moved to Manhattan. [3] [15]
Foglia's work is held in the following permanent collections: