Lucas Foglia’s Re-Wilding photo series
by Lucas Foglia’s Re-Wilding series is an intimate look at ‘a network of people throughout the southeastern United States who had left mainstream society to adopt wilderness or homesteading lifestyles’. We spoke to him about the project. Can you tell us what made you decide to embark on the project? ‘I grew up with my extended family on a farm in suburban Long Island. Influenced by the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s, my parents maintained an agricultural lifestyle as malls and supermarkets developed around us. We heated with wood, grew and canned our food and bartered plants for everything from shoes to dentistry’.
‘Most of my subjects live off-the-grid, build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby streams and hunt, gather or grow their own food. Many start fires with friction, tan animal hides for clothing and collect herbs for medicine. I am drawn to my subjects’ desire for self-sufficiency and intrigued by the complexity of their relationship with the natural world. Rewilding is defined as the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization’.
Your photos portray a kind of utopia. Did you find this easily at the communities you visited or is it something you had to look for or recreate? ‘I think of my photographs as fictions that are accurate to the spaces in which I am photographing. Utopia implies a place in which social, legal, and political justice exist in perfect harmony. While I admire my subjects’ skills and intentions, I do not want to depict a utopia.
Instead, this series is about the complexity of people’s relationship to nature and survival in one of the few developed countries in which there is still a wilderness we can return to’.
What made you decide to donate proceeds of your print sales to the subjects in particular photographs? ‘I donate a portion of the proceeds from my print sales to either the subject of the photograph or a related charity. I also give my subjects a copy of each print. I think of my photographs as collaborations between my subjects and myself and as such I want the sale of my prints to benefit my subjects, myself and the idea that I am exploring within the series’.
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