PHOTO:Lucas Foglia-Human Nature
Lucas Foglia grew up with his family on a small farm in the suburbs of New York City. While malls and supermarkets developed around them, they heated their house with wood, farmed and canned their food, and bartered the plants they grew for everything, while his family followed many of the principles of the back-to-the-land movement, by the time he was 18 they owned three tractors, four cars, and five computers. This mixture of the modern world in their otherwise rustic life made him curious to see what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Foam Archive
Lucas Foglia is a storyteller in the tradition of the great American photographers who show social commitment without losing sight of the aesthetics. His series “Human Nature” brings together stories about nature, people, government, and the science of our relationship to wilderness. The starting point for his third and latest project “Human Nature” that is on presentation at Foam in Amsterdam, is Hurricane Sandy. In 2012, this hurricane flooded his family’s fields and blew down the oldest trees in the woods. On the news, scientists linked the storm to climate change caused by human activity. Foglia realised that if humans are changing the weather, then there is no place on earth unaltered by people. “Human Nature” leads us through Foglia’s journey in sequences of photographs. It begins and ends with interpretations of paradise, moving through cities, forests, farms, deserts, ice fields, and oceans in between. Scientists are pictured as they work to quantify and understand our relationship with the natural world, measuring how we change nature and how spending time in wild spaces changes us. For his first photographic project “A Natural Order”, Foglia travelled throughout the South Eastern United States from 2006 through 2010 befriending, photographing, and interviewing a network of people who left cities and suburbs to live off the grid. Motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs or the global economic recession, they chose to build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby springs, and hunt, gather, or grow their own food. His second body of work “Frontcountry” (2006-13) is a photographic account of people living in the midst of a mining boom that is transforming the modern American West. Foglia’s work is driven by the desire to tell stories, and it conveys an understanding of the land as a resource and inquisitiveness as to how people make a living from it. The images feel rooted in the romance of the American landscape, yet his work has a signature that always refers back to its inhabitants. His practice continues in the line of previous American social documentary photographers whose work, in book and print form, is intended as a prolonged and measured examination of a theme.
Info: Foam Fotografiemuseum, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Duration: 2/2-15/4/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org
