Lucas Foglia

Alex Running Home, Wyoming

Lucas Foglia’s series entitled Frontcountry explores the ranching, farming and mining boom communities in the western United States. Drawing on personal experience, Foglia examines the commercialisation, property expansion and economic struggles which continually put pressure on these small-town communities and their way of life.

“The people who owned land around my family’s farm on Long Island sold and developed it in the housing boom of the past decade. When I visit, I can see new houses looking down at our fields from the top of the hill where the woods used to be. Now, as property taxes continue to rise, my parents are facing economic pressures to sell their land and resettle further from the suburbs of New York City.”

Foglia first began travelling to the rural West in search of areas which remained roadless and were, as Foglia describes, ”a frontier between small and wild spaces”. Documenting the towns, landscapes and inhabitants discovered along the way, Foglia records a picture of a seemingly fading way of life. Despite the fact that many of the communities he has visited remain rural enough that it has yet to become profitable for the large chain stores to establish themselves, jobs remain very limited, and “as ranching and farming become less profitable, those people who stay often struggle between a fierce loyalty to their land and a dependence on industries that extract from the land”.