In the late fall of 2009, the photographer Lucas Foglia set out on a rural road in Wyoming and got caught up in the vastness of the land.
For Mr. Foglia, raised
on a small farm on Long Island, the landscape he encountered was
“bigger and harsher” than any he had ever seen. To his right hung a blue
sky over acres of snow-covered sagebrush, but straight in front of his
car was a storm cloud. Blinded by the snowstorm’s “white wall of cloud,”
he skidded off the road.
After about 20 minutes
of silence (amplified by the lack of cars and cellphone reception), a
pickup truck pulled over. The driver stepped out, grabbed a rope from
the back and towed Mr. Foglia’s car back to the road.
Mr. Foglia had an immediate realization.
In the American West,
the communities were a “tight net and people took care of each other,
because they had to in a place like that,” he said.
Those close networks
of individuals, and the lands they lived on, would be the subject of his
work for the next four years. The photographs of Texas, New Mexico,
Nevada, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, most of which he took as a graduate
student at Yale, eventually became the “Frontcountry” collection, released as a book last year by Nazraeli Press.
Throughout
interactions with ranchers, farmers, mining employees and other local
residents, he learned that two stories occurred in these areas — and few
dealt with his original expectation of “nomadic cowboys on horseback.”
One concerned the wild
landscape itself, with its ranchers and farmers. The other was that of
the mining and energy development boom, its workers and how that
economic force was transforming the landscape.
“People in the towns I visited knew that what was happening there was unbelievable,” he said.
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