Communal living has been a continuous presence in American cultural history, threading its way through the centuries starting with the Dutch Mennonites in Delaware in the 1600s, soon followed by the Shakers and shorter-lived groups such as the Amana Colonies, the Rappites, and the Oneida Community. Hippie communes of the 1960s promoted the communal experience in full color, adding a new patina to the rejection of society’s norms in favor of alternative approaches to life and work.

Society has always had its citizens who have built intentional communities as they advanced religious and political causes, promoted social reform, homesteaded land, and produced art.

History lesson aside, Lucas Foglia’s book A Natural Order, published by Nazraeli Press, is an important recording of some contemporary alternative communities in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia. The book gives us a series of complex portraits – of people, places, things (and situations) that mostly read as poetry, sometimes with a little slice of “is this slightly disturbing, or is it just me?” to consider: A three-year old girl is dressed in a woodland fairy costume, blue fingernail polish chipped, dirty hands holding a mostly-gnawed deer rib. Chunks of venison lay in blood-pink water in a bathtub, in preparation for canning, surrounded by cheery green walls, a hand-hooked bathmat, and monogrammed towels. A teenage boy sits on a bed dressed in camouflage; gun resting on headboard, a confederate flag with a skull and snake hangs as a window covering. A naked father and daughter play in a pond, she crouches on his chest, he floats Christ-like on his back, eyes closed.

Gorgeously printed as expected from Nazraeli Press, some unexpected elements in this oversized book include a comprehensive reading list (want to hone up on your primitive and homesteading skills, or learn who is publishing some good field guides these days?) solicited from Foglia’s subjects. Also included is a traditional “zine” from a resident of the Wildroots Homestead in North Carolina, illustrated with drawings of bird species and edible plants. Titled wildlifoodin, it serves both as a memoir and a manual (how to build a debris shelter, how to correctly gut a deer). Readers are encouraged to make copies of the “zine” and give them away.

Why do I think this book is important? Because it seems that right now, as a nation, we are at a critical crossroads economically, politically, socially, and environmentally. Who doesn’t feel sometimes like they want to throw their hands up and try to create their own system of self-sufficiency?

The people in A Natural Order have done just that. — Laura Moya

Laura Moya: In a way, you are visually recording the continuation of the libertarianism movement in America – it is amazing that it is still an option in this country to this extent. How do you see your work documenting this movement in a historical context?

Lucas Foglia: From 2006 through 2010, I traveled throughout the southeastern United States befriending, photographing, and interviewing a network of people who left cities and suburbs to live off the grid. People have moved back to the land there for generations because land is affordable and arable, because a well-chosen plot will likely have a fresh water spring on it, and because the libertarian philosophy that is ubiquitous in the region gives a person, family or community the freedom to live how they choose.

LM: There are different communities portrayed in the book. What united all of the communities that you photographed?

LF: There are over a dozen different communities represented in the book. In moving off the grid, some people were motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs, or predictions of the economic recession. Everyone I photographed was working to maintain a self-sufficient lifestyle.

At the same time, no one I found lives in complete isolation from the mainstream. Many have websites that they update using laptop computers, and cell phones that they charge on car batteries or solar panels. They do not wholly reject the modern world. Instead, they step away from it and choose the parts that they want to bring with them.

LM: The reality of a “perfect utopia” is most likely non-existent. All intentional communities (as well mainstream society) have a “grey,” if not “dark” side. What are some of the hardships people wrestled with in the various communities you spent time with? What are some of the tensions you noted?

LF: “It’s hard to feed yourself for a year,” Lowell said. “One problem you run into is that most people who are independent enough to try to live separate from worldly things are too independent to listen to each other.”

Living off the grid in the woods can be isolating, and growing enough food to feed a family takes a lot of work. Some communities struggled to maintain their religious observance. Others struggled to teach their children liberal values despite the conservative neighbors. Some of the communities I visited were patriarchal. While most children were homeschooled, they knew a lot more about wild edible plants than they knew about mathematics.

Natalie said “A lot of us who live here came with a kind of post-activist outlook—realizing that the world is really messed up, that nature is being destroyed, and being incredibly dissatisfied with consumer culture and the whole idea of success in modern society. All of us wanted to live close to the land… Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s the closest that I’ve ever seen when it’s functioning.”

LM: Content-wise, your work falls in a place somewhere between documentary and anthropological portraiture – with a good dose of “fine art” thrown in. Talk about finding your subjects, choices in composition, and talk about making “discoveries” in your shooting process.

LF: I met almost everyone portrayed in the book through friends of my family, and friends of my friends.

Photographs to me, are interpretations. Some of the photographs in the book are candid and others are performed for my camera. I worked from the events that were happening around me, and I didn’t make things up from scratch because I think the world is more complicated than the things I can come up with in my head. The photographs I made resulted from my relationships with the people and spaces I photographed, and the narrative of the book resulted from the choice and sequence of the best photographs.

LM: Sometimes the most “natural” imagery (child given milk straight from goat’s teat, people wearing animal skins for clothing) is tremendously strange and exotic to the “mainstream” eye. How is it that we have generally become so detached?

LF: Anais Nin wrote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” For instance, when I found the black bear at Kevin’s land in Virginia, I was struck by how human it seemed. Similarly, Natalie, who I first photographed in 2006, said, “When I skinned my first raccoon, I cried. It looked so much like a fetus to me. It was really hard. But it’s easy now. It’s interesting how that changes.”

LM: You do well by not pushing propaganda toward your viewer. Talk about how your strongest images are simultaneously “intimate” and “ambiguous” – can you give an example?

LF: Above all I’m interested in making a seductive photograph. I think any photograph that is didactic, that tells a viewer what to think, is easy to forget. My hope is that these photographs provoke people to ask questions and start conversations.

Talia, who also lives at Wildroots Homestead in North Carolina said: “Over the years I’ve come to realize that most people are not going to, nor do they have any desire to, radically change their lives. Most people can’t walk away from the kids’ schools or their jobs or their mortgages, or whatever. They just can’t, and it would be asking too much for them to do it. But they can take some steps in just teaching themselves—learning more about gardening, learning more about food preservation and taking care of their own health. So there are things people can do to become a little more self-sufficient… if there’s any hope at all of being able to transition into a less chaotic life.”

What would living life “off the grid” – with no electricity or running water – be like? One man who can offer an insight is the American photographer Lucas Foglia. It was growing up on a small family farm in New York state that Foglia got his first taste of the back-to-land movement: his family heated their house with wood, farmed and canned their own food and used the plants they grew to barter for everything from shoes to dental work.

“But while my family followed many of the [back-to-land] principles, by the time I was 18 we also owned three tractors, four cars and five computers, and this mixture of modern and rustic living made me curious to see what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like,” says Foglia.

So, from 2006 through to 2010, Foglia travelled throughout the south-eastern United States, interviewing and photographing a network of people who had left the cities and suburbs to live rurally, relying on his family and friends’ connections to make contact with these hardcore pro-isolationists.

The resulting series, “A Natural Order”, is a startlingly primitive series of images that make us question the value of our own gilded lives. These wild-living communities build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby springs, and hunt, gather or grow their own food.

It’s a hard life, for sure – so why do they do it? “Most people here were in search of a less chaotic life, freed from the excesses of consumer culture,” says Foglia. “I hope these images start a conversation. I don’t expect people to radically change their lives, but they can take some steps – such as learning more about gardening – to become more self-sufficient.”

Lucas Foglia: the photographer in search of off-the-grid Americans

Raised by back-to-the-landers, he scoured the US in a camper van, seeking out people who have gone further than his parents.

Lucas Foglia, who is 29 and looks 19, grew up on a farm on Long Island just 30 miles from Manhattan. His parents were part of the post 1960s “back-to-the land” movement, fired up on the writing of self-sufficiency pioneers such as Helen and Scott Nearing and Wendell Berry. By the time Foglia reached adolescence, the woods and fields around the farm had become suburbanised, but his parents continued to grow and preserve their own food, and to barter with other families throughout the area.

Having graduated from Yale, where he was taught by Gregory Crewdson, Foglia bought a camper van and set off with his camera and a few necessities on the thousand-mile drive to the Appalachians. “Photography for me,” he says, “is a mechanism to learn about things. I wanted to see if I could find the absolute, if there were communities or individuals who lived off the grid and were wholly self-sufficient.”

Five years and several long trips south later, Foglia has produced one of the most beautiful and thought-provoking photobooks of the year. Called A Natural Order, it is a portrait of another America peopled by communities that have taken Foglia’s parents’ vision several steps further. “I found people who lived without money, who built houses from trees grown on their land, who drank fresh water from mountain streams,” says Foglia. “But I did not find anyone who was absolutely off the grid. Many of them had cellphones, laptops, pickup trucks, solar panels with electric sockets. Even the communities that were so off the map that they did not have a postal address were plugged in in some way.”

Foglia’s method is to “meet people, build relationships, then make photographs that come out of those relationships”. It shows. The images in the book are often deceptively simple, sometimes deceptively romantic: young women pick fruit from hedgerows; men till the land; a child in Amish dress gazes though the sun-dappled door of a barn.

But there are darker subtexts. In one shot, a youth in camouflage fatigues, sits alone in a room with a .22 calibre automatic rifle nestling on the window sill. In another, what looks like a traditional Mennonite family turns out to be an ex-nuclear engineer and his wife, both former members of the Hells Angels, who live near, but not within, an established Mennonite community. “There is a kind of radical libertarianism in the psyche around these parts of the country: rural Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina. So these new, back-to-the-land communities are tolerated. The prevailing attitude is: you can do what you want so long as you don’t bother each other.”

One or twice, Foglia came across a few communities that were cultish in aspect, and others that were “utterly patriarchal”. He also encountered families who lived beside traditional Amish or Mennonite communities; they adopted their way of dressing in order to escape paying taxes or sending their kids to regular schools. Sometimes, the back-to-the-land philosophy had unintended consequences. “Some kids I met had completely abandoned their parent’s values,” says Foglia, “Part of the risk for liberal people moving to really isolated rural conservative communities is that the kids will become more like the neighbors than their parents.”

Foglia has befriended and kept in touch with many of the people in the book, one of whom created a kind of zine-style self-help guide to wild food that comes with every copy.

Foglia cites the “photographic lyricism” of William Gedney, Emmet Gowin and Larry Towell as influences. And the abiding influence of the Yale school of rigorous formalism is in there, too. “I was taught by Crewdson that a photograph is something you look through at something else. Philip Locra di Corcia called it ‘a citadel of transparency’, which is a fancy way of saying we don’t look at the surface of a picture, but we create a perception of a world. That’s what I’m aiming at.”

The world Foglia depicts in A Natural Order is a constantly surprising one. A picture of a decomposing bear hints at the danger lurking in these other edens. A man working a 100-year-old plough pulled by a pickup truck speaks of the contradictions of the contemporary back-to-the-land movement. “I shot over 45,000 pictures,” says Foglia. “There are 45 in the book. I’m rigorous when it comes to editing. I want the best pictures to redefine the story. I want the work to be beautiful, but I don’t want the subject matter to be idealised. It’s a hard way of life, sometimes a dangerous one. You meet people with different aims and visions, from puritanical to utopian, but what they have in common is an ideal of independence.”

From urban beekeeping to artisanal pickling, there’s an uptick in America’s interest in doing it ourselves. Photographer Lucas Foglia has been in touch with this pre-consumer age mindset his entire life, having grown up on a small Long Island farm where, he says, his family “heated our house with wood, farmed and canned our food, and bartered the plants we grew for everything from shoes to dental work.” For the past five years the Yale-trained artist has been photographing a network of off-the-gird communities in the southeastern United States. The work has just been published in a lush, large-format monograph, A Natural Order.

Tucked away in the woods and fields of rural Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia, some of the communities Foglia visited are religious, others are united by a passion for embracing ancestral ways of hunting, foraging and building, others are motivated by predictions of global economic collapse.

Foglia’s subjects live with equal measure grit and beauty. In one photo, a toddler in a grubby, winged fairy dress reclines on a quilt and gazes at the sky, a gnawed venison rib clutched in one hand. In another, a salvaged sink is propped on boards, and tucked into edenic bramble. His photos of interiors highlight their simple rustic allure, is if shot for a high-end design magazine for survivalists. A bathroom painted in a hip shade of teal features an abundance of fluffy monogrammed towels, pillar candles on a rough-hewn pedestal; in the claw-foot tub a butchered deer soaks, the seeping haunches surrounded in watermelon-pink bathwater.

The stories of what compelled any given individual to pursue this experience are untold in A Natural Order. Instead, through Foglia’s keen eye for detail and tremendous sense of composition, we simply get a glimpse of their way of life. However, clothing—or, alternatively, the lack thereof—clues us in as to which type of group they might belong. There are some long-haired parents and their cherubic children in their natural state. There are those wearing self-styled outfits made of hides and natural fibers. And there are Christian women and girls who wear modest homemade frocks, even in the swimming hole.

The general theme Foglia has taken on has been touched on by other contemporary art photographers over the last ten years, including Justine Kurland, Joel Sternfeld and Taj Forer. However, Foglia is particularly interested in the way these communities straddle the ancestral and the modern, as his own family did. “They do not wholly reject the modern world. Instead, they step away from it and choose the parts that they want to bring with them,” says Foglia of his subjects. Interested readers can even ferret out the websites of some of the communities he includes, and find themselves tempted to go there and take classes on traditional building or foraging for food. One can also gain insight—and learn real skills— from, Wildifoodin’ the anonymously –authored, illustrated ‘zine included with the book. Part journal, part survival manual, it reads like a poet’s version of the Whole Earth Catalog, the bible for 1970’s back-to-the-landers.

Foglia’s book implies that there is a new movement afoot, one whose philosophies are diverse, but all share self-reliance as a key value. If so, it’s right on time, economically speaking. In an era when houses can be foreclosed, and most of our food is from unknown sources, the beauty that Foglia’s pictures captures is a recognition of human needs: the needs to create, and to control our destinies.

How many of us have had dreams of leaving?

Turning one’s back on the material world.
Living in Nature.
Growing food, fishing and hunting.
Swimming in rivers. Cooking on campfires.
Waking with the dawn and retiring with the sun?

The Modern Age and its clamour held at bay by our own self-sufficiency.

Dreams of living off the grid.

Lucas Foglia has spent five years documenting the lives of the people who have decided to do just this.

In his remarkable series : A Natural Order (and now a meticulously curated book of the same title, published by Nazraeli Press) – Foglia has photographed and recorded a network of people throughout the southeastern United States who, motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs, or predictions of economic collapse, have made their exodus from cities and suburbs to re-create their lives in remote natural places.

Foglia is fascinated by re-invention – the capacity to make a decisive intervention into one’s life and emerge changed. Describing himself “more drawn to people who had recently made their choice and who are still trying to figure it out”, his images are at once nuanced and arresting. Some hint at a ‘back-story’, some follow the same person over several years as they grow-up; others have a lyricism and stillness, a grace of gesture which seems to capture the lives of people in tune with circadian rhythms.

Foglia puts it in these terms : “Photographs, to me, are interpretations. Some images were candid and others were performed for my camera. I worked from the events that were happening around me, and I didn’t make things up from scratch because I think the world is more complicated than the things I can come up with in my head”.

At first glance, this is an image of an Amish or Mennonite family, showing the clothes and appurtenances of their community. But the willingness to pose for Foglia’s camera is, of itself, unusual. Then there’s the evidence of a bond of trust between the family and the photographer, who appear to be actively complying in the staging of their family portrait. The caption imparts the names of husband and wife, and the information that the unadorned woman with the unwavering gaze is the same Christina featured in the photo she is holding of herself in full white wedding dress and jewels. And then there’s the hint of a tattoo on George’s arm.

Neither Foglia nor his subjects are making any attempt to eradicate the story of their past. It’s owned and assimilated in a complex understanding of what makes us individual, and how we forge our identities and values.

This is a central preoccupation of Foglia’s, returning as he does to a line from Kurt Vonnegut that has stuck in his head: “Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.”

Three beautiful women with luxurious hair are wading, thigh-high and fully clothed, in a tranquil river. Foglia explains that whilst these sisters are not explicitly members of a Christian community, they have chosen to live near one. And their choice to swim in their dresses both
fits their values and also allows them to fit in.

As Foglia puts it : “There is an idealism to the way they live. And when you live a lifestyle for long enough, it becomes Culture and when it becomes Culture, it becomes you”.

This is a penetrating insight into the relationship between custom and belief. Foglia’s photographs have a powerful capacity to depict simultaneously both the context, the physical world of his subject, and to capture a moment of intense psychological revelation.

Foglia wants his photographs to be connected to his values. Not just the “what” but the “how” of their making. But above all he wants them to be “seductive” – a word he’s borrowed from Taryn Simon. Both artists go to places where they expect to find a story. But once there, it becomes all about the picture – an intuitive response to a subject based more on impulse than reason. And this in turn becomes the litmus test when, back home, only the most ‘seductive’ images make the cut and in turn redefine the story.

David in his Wigwam, Kevin’s Land, Virginia is a touchstone image for Foglia because it has all of the components he values. “The light and colors create the scene. The things on the ground are not arranged for the photograph, yet each object says something about David. The picture feels intimate. It resulted from years of knowing him, and from the fact that it was extremely cold that morning. Because it was cold we stayed inside. David had built a window in the wigwam and slept right next to it so he could see the sunrise”.

Lucas Foglia describes his own upbringing in his Artist’s Statement, growing up on a small farm in the New York suburbs, and living by many of the principles of the back-to-the-land movement. But his family was far from doctrinaire, ending-up with cars, computers and the full panoply of mechanization.

Foglia (unlike most of his subjects whose lives are, at their essence, acts of rebellion), still lives largely by the values of his upbringing and its lightly-worn accommodations.

He reflects, “the photograph of Cora and Wesley is the last portrait I made of Cora in 2010. She called me a few weeks ago to invite me to their wedding next September, when Cora turns 18. Over the five years of working on the project I saw some children rebel while others built houses next door to their parents”.

Foglia’s mission is not to proselytize but to start conversations, and his work combines photography with recordings of the people he photographs. Vivid and colloquial, Foglia’s audios enable people living off the grid to speak directly:

“Talia, who lives at Wildroots Homestead in North Carolina said: ‘Over the years I’ve come to realize that most people are not going to, nor do they have any desire to, radically change their lives. Most people can’t walk away from the kids’ schools or their jobs or their mortgages, or whatever. But they can take some steps in just teaching themselves—learning more about gardening, learning more about food preservation and taking care of their own health. So there are things people can do to become a little more self-sufficient… if there’s any hope at all of being able to transition into a less chaotic life.’”

A Natural Order is not a campaign to get people to live off the grid. The photographs present neither idyll nor horror, though a few images do shock and many seem paradisiac. If they have a message at all, it is as a testament to individual self-determination, with all the manifold paradoxes and adjustments when human beings try to live according to their principles. Above all, it’s a work that challenges the reductive effect of stereotype, favouring the complexities of a psychologically derived enquiry.

Primitive and Homesteading Skills

Wendell Berry, Robin Blankenship, Gregory J. Davenport, Thomas J. Elpel, Peter Goodchild, Richard and Linda Jamison, Horace Kephart, Dale Martin, John and Geri McPherson, Scott Nearing and Helen Nearing, Larry Dean Olsen, Michael Pewtherer, David Petersen, Matt Richards, Eric Sloane, Tamarack Song, U.S. Army Handbooks, Reader’s Digest Back to Basics, Steve Watts, David Wescott, Steven Edholm and Tamara Wilder

Food and Medicine

Steve Brill, Anthony J. Cichoke, Francois Couplan, Doug Elliott, Sally Fallon, Euell Gibbons, Rosemary Gladstar, Alan Hall, David Hoffman, Jessica Houdret, Sandor Ellix Katz, E. Barrie Kavasch, Deborah Lee, Christopher Nyerges, Andrea Pieroni and Lisa Leimer Price, Weston A. Price, Linda Runyon, Vickie Shufer, Samuel Thayer, Susan Weed

Field Guides

National Audubon Society, Thomas Elpel, David Foster, National Geographic, Janice Glim-Lacy, William Carey Grimm, James H. Miller, National Wildlife Federation, Newcomb Guide, Peterson Field Guides, Sibley Field Guides, May Theilgaard Watts

Schools and Gatherings:

Southeast:
http://www.primitiveskills.org
http://www.fireflygathering.org

Northeast:
https://www.ancestralknowledge.org
www.draftanimalpowernetwork.org

West:
http://www.backtracks.net

Download the Guidebook for Beginning Farmers

Exhibition images and videos of talks by MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, community activist and urban farmer Will Allen and storyteller Doug Elliott are online here.

Essay by curator Jo-Ann Conklin

A Natural Order presents an intriguing and seductive view of life off-the-grid. For viewers of a certain age (such as myself), it rings with remembrances of the 1960s, of hippie communes, free love, rebellion against the establishment, and a youthful joy of life. Today the focus has changed from unjust wars to unsustainable life practices, yet the youthful ability to visualize a better way and to act upon the vision persists.

Viewing the development of Lucas Foglia’s series over the past few years, I have been struck by the intense beauty of many images. These notable and iconic photos—such as Acorn with Possum Stew or Jasmine, Hannah and Cecilia Swimming, to name just two—influence a reading of the series as a contemporary pastoral, an idealized vision of humans in harmony with nature. Foglia’s intentions are, however, more nuanced. He acknowledges a desire to be enticing, to use beauty to draw us in, in hopes of opening our eyes to the benefits of sustainable living. And, along the way he grounds the series with images that speak to social issues: the divide between his subjects and mainstream society, the paternal hierarchy that is still in force amongst some of his subjects. All of this, Foglia combines into his “narrative interpretation” of life off-grid.

More than a mere observer, Foglia shares his subjects’ commitment to self-sustainability. His concern for the human connection to the land dates back to his childhood and has informed his photographic practice to date.

“I grew up with my extended family on a small farm in the suburbs of New York City. While malls and supermarkets developed around us, we heated our house with wood, farmed and canned our food, and bartered the plants we grew for everything from shoes to dental work.” Lucas Foglia

As an undergraduate at Brown University, Foglia photographed at the Southside Community Land Trust, an organization that converts vacant lots into productive food gardens and market farms in low-income neighborhoods. Even at that early age, all of the factors were in place for his future photographic inquiries: his chosen subject, his considerable eye for color and composition, and perhaps most important, his ability to connect with his subjects via a fervent curiosity and an inherent and profound openness.

In two subsequent series, Foglia searched out people who have retained or reinstated their connection to the land as source of food, shelter, and sustenance. Frontcountry, his current work-in-progress, explores life in mining boom towns and in ranching and farming communities across the western United States. A Natural Order, (2006–2010), focuses on those who have left cities and suburbs to live off-the-grid in the southeastern United States. Beginning in the summer of 2006, Foglia met, stayed with, photographed, and recorded conversations with people at established “rewilding” communities such as Wildroots Earthskills Homestead, at Christian communities such as Russell Creek Community, and with smaller independent groups. His subjects have embraced a self-sufficient lifestyle for varied reasons: religious, environmental or political; liberal or libertarian. They all strive for self-sufficiency and sustainability, but none are totally isolated from the outside. As Foglia tells us, “Many have websites that they update using laptop computers and cell phones that they charge on car batteries or solar panels.”

Throughout the series, Foglia demonstrates a telling lack of concern for journalistic narrative. Images from differing communities are intermingled in a manner that would not be used if his intentions were strictly documentary. Particularly telling is his use of the voices of his subjects. Although he keeps copious recordings of candid conversations and interviews, he chooses to use these quotes sparingly—almost atmospherically—and without direct association to images of the person speaking. When he does include quotes, they are enticingly specific, answering the questions that are forming in viewers’ minds. Why have these people chosen to live off-grid? How do they manage it? Or, as in the following, giving us a glimpse into a living that seems both adventurous and exotic.

“Probably 20 percent of my food comes out of the swamp. Counting the meat, I get probably 80 percent of the wild meat out of the swamp. Beaver, otter, deer, raccoon, fish. Whatever I bump into. I’ve eaten owl.” Colbert (Georgia)

Foglia begins his narrative with Cora in a Realtree Camouflage Dress. A particularly literal images, it sends an immediate message of difference: a young women in a modest dress and head covering stands in opposition to brightly colored, modern clothing displayed in a store window. The fact that her “plain dress” is made from camouflage-printed fabric is somewhat perplexing. We recognize plain dress in dark colors and unprinted fabrics as religiously conservative. Camouflage reads either as functional for hunting or as fashionable in urban wear adopted from military surplus. As I learned, Realtree, the trademark creator and marketer of camo patterns, sells everything from bikinis and cellphone cases to traditional hunting wear. Cora’s homemade dress may be evidence of a sub-culture that is unknown to this writer, or of a young girl’s striving for fashion within the confines of her community, or both.

In contrast to this and other literal, informational works are photographs of an iconic and evocative nature that bring to mind the pastoral. An idealized depiction of country life, the pastoral in literature dates back to the Greeks, interestingly demonstrating that even at that early point in history humans felt that an ideal state in nature (The Golden Age) had been lost. Literature on the pastoral is extensive and concise definitions difficult to find. Sometimes discussed as a landscape genre, the pastoral is at other times defined as a mode. Victoria Bringing in the Goats, Tennessee nicely fulfills the genre of the pastoral. We are presented with a sweeping landscape and the requisite flock and shepherd (Victoria), the “pastoralist” from which the term derives. Other aspects of the pastoral that are pertinent to Foglia’s series include the concept of the bounties of nature—of nature served up for mankind rather than worked from the ground—and a belief in nature as a cure for urban problems. Created for an urban audience, pastorals askew the depiction of labor, focusing instead on leisure or idles. Having grown up on a farm, Foglia is aware of the work involved in living off the land. Yet, he only occasionally presents us with people at work. A young man clearing a field with a scythe, reveal the only arduous labor within the series. An older man plows a field, employing a hand plow behind a truck rather than a horse. The message here is not so much one of hard work, but rather of the combination of old and modern technology. Women go fishing or gather berries, collecting that which nature has provided. And in Woodcutting, Russell Creek Community, Tennessee, while the title indicates their activity, the two young men are depicted at a moment of rest. Not concerned with work at all, the focus of this image is found in the brotherly hand on the shoulder of the younger sibling, an action of protection and kinship.

Images of children are among the most bucolic. Quiet moments between parents and children are caught in Creek, Kevin’s Land, Virginia (in which a mother watches as a naked child plays in a densely forested creek) and Patrick and Anakeesta swimming, Tennessee (depicting a child climbing onto the chest of a nude man floating in a lake). And, what could be more demonstrative of nature’s bounties than drinking milk straight from a goat’s teat? An performance suggested by the subjects, Andrew and Taurin Drinking Raw Goat’s Milk, is a complex composition of arms and goat and boy, rendered in harmonic tones of blonde.

As beautifully composed, but to vastly different ends, is Valarie and the Shadow, Tennessee. Valerie, who is perhaps 11 years old, stands in the background, her body and face placed carefully, half in light and half in shadow, while the shadow of a male figure looms in the foreground. Foglia has created a striking and foreboding image of coming-of-age. Valerie emerges into womanhood, but it is an adulthood that will be overshadowed by men. The image may refer to the patriarchal nature of the community, however, given the state of our society, it is almost impossible to read the image without sexual overtones.

Rebecca with Squirrel Loincloth, North Carolina portrays Rebecca in her “fancy,” dress, worn on special occasions, alongside her husband and child. Ostensibly a family portrait, the image is rife with patriarchal symbolism. If the man were in a loincloth and the child naked, Foglia would have a back-to-earth scenario of Edenic bliss and equality. The reality is, however, more complicated. In documenting Rebecca’s regalia, he has created a bifurcated image—“primitive” on the right, civilized at left—that speaks to the pull between the two lifestyles and their shared and continuing sexism.

In A Natural Order, Foglia has taken on a timely topic and explicated it through images of exceptional artistry. We are presented with aspects of life off-grid that seem exotic in contrast to urban culture—from bark-covered huts in which inhabits sleep on fur-covered straw and read National Geographic by gaslight, to roadkill stew and bathtubs full of venison. We are shown strong bodies (James Aiming, North Carolina) and death (Bear, Poisoned by Neighbors, Virginia, which seems more man than bear).

But Foglia saves his singularly most striking image for the closing. Illuminated by a shaft of morning light worthy of any old master, a man sleeps in an enclosure on the ground. A rose-colored blanket and dark turquoise cap glow against the neutral tones and texture of his smooth skin and a nubby wool sweater. In the shadows we discover a gas lamp, eating utensils, and a concave mirror that reflects a small patch of turquoise cap. It is difficult to imagine a more satisfying image of a hermit in his cave, or David in his Wigwam.

A conversation with Daniel Shea, March 2011

Daniel Shea: So since talking to you last year, it sounds like you’ve been pretty busy. What have you been up to recently?

Lucas Foglia: Since we last talked I made a final trip to the southeastern United States, and revisited many of the people who I have been photographing since 2006. Nazraeli Press is publishing a book of the project, titled A Natural Order, this spring. The book focuses on Americans who responded to environmental concerns and predictions of economic collapse by leaving cities and suburbs to live off the grid. My hope is that the photographs seem both exotic and unnervingly close to home.

Daniel Shea: And since the book is about to be published, are you working on a new series?

Lucas Foglia: Yes, I have been dividing time between San Francisco, mining boom towns and ranching and farming communities in the western United States. The working title of the series is Frontcountry. Many of the people who I have been photographing live on the boundaries between small towns and wild roadless areas. It’s not yet profitable for chain stores to move into the most remote communities. Jobs opportunities there are also limited, and as ranching and farming become less lucrative, many families are struggling to reconcile their fierce loyalty to the land with their growing dependence on industries that extract from and degrade the land.

Daniel Shea: So you’re based in San Francisco, and your van.

Lucas Foglia: Yes, although the photographs I have been making recently are closer to home.

Daniel Shea: What prompted the move to where you are now?

Lucas Foglia: Friends, community and landscape. Some of my closest friends are here in the Bay Area. San Francisco feels like a small town even though it is a big city and there are good photographers here. And it is near the landscape that I’ve been photographing.

Daniel Shea: You said you live with friends in a co-op?

Lucas Foglia: Yes. We grow vegetables, and buy most of our food in bulk and from local farmers. It makes it easy and affordable to live in what would otherwise be a fairly expensive city. As for what allows me to stay here, most of my time goes to my personal projects that I fund through print sales, grants and commissions, but I do some editorial and advertising work as well. I like working with non-profit organizations, so the photographs I make help to promote a cause I believe in. I have also started to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Daniel Shea: The ambiguity in your work is a narrative strategy that you use well. The work you do for magazines and non-profits involves telling a clear story. Are the photographs you make for them are completely non-ambiguous?

Lucas Foglia: I think all the best pictures have some ambiguity. But they have to be accessible: they have to tell a story and make a viewer want to keep looking at them.

[We trail off for a bit, but then Yale comes up...]

Daniel Shea: Yale is frequently mystified and enlarged by the rest of the art/photo world and prospective MFA students. It’s a thing of its own. And the reality might be different than that. How was your experience in the program?

Lucas Foglia: It’s surprising that it is so frequently mystified… I know that it is statistically hard to get into as a graduate student, but anyone can go to any critique and listen. Before I applied, I visited some critiques, so I knew what I was getting into. Different photographers and curators are invited to the critiques but when I was there Tod Papageorge ran the show. And Tod’s photographic references were consistent: John Szarkowski, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand. Each graduate student showed work every 5 weeks. The panel of critics sat behind a table. The photographs were pinned on the wall, and the graduate student sat in a chair in the middle of the room, facing the panel, with an audience behind him or her. There were some classes each semester, but there were no real obligations besides having to produce work for the critiques.

Daniel Shea: So were you traveling between the critique sessions?

Lucas Foglia: I was traveling a lot. I would extend the school vacations for a week on either end. I drove or flew to photograph and then came back to make up the work and class time. It was a really intense and stressful couple of years.

Daniel Shea: Are you happy you went with that program?

Lucas Foglia: I am. There were times when I was doubtful about it. The critiques were harsh and I was being pushed in ways I wasn’t always comfortable with. But then I realized that even when I was being told to do something, all I had to do was react and make more photographs. I didn’t always agree with the critiques but I had the time and facilities to make new work in response. When artwork gets obliging or defensive in graduate school, it’s a slippery slope. Above all the photographs have to feel personal. What the faculty wanted to see was an effort towards change or experimentation. And if I responded by working my ass off and that showed in the pictures, then it was commended.

Daniel Shea: What’s interesting to me is that, in the context of the rigor you mentioned, practically I imagine that applied to the process of making work. And for your work, the process is so specific. And so I imagine it being tricky to rigorously take apart your process.

Lucas Foglia: It was tricky because of the personal relationships I have with the people I photograph.

Daniel Shea: So what’s the variable that changed in that equation as you went through this process?

Lucas Foglia: What changed at Yale was not the collaborative process of making the pictures, nor was it my personal connection with my subjects. Rather, I tried to make the form, or composition, of my photographs more rigorous. I learned that a great photograph relies on both form and content.

Daniel Shea: So that translated to a working methodology that you have continued to use?

Lucas Foglia: Sure. I think the photographs I make result from my relationships with the people and spaces I photograph, and the narratives of my projects result from my choice and sequence of the best photographs. And I always leave room for surprises. For instance, I went to an area south of Eden, Wyoming, where a rancher was herding his sheep. The railroad company that owned the land nearby had recently sold the mineral rights to a company based in Houston for natural gas drilling and the land was about to be mined. When I arrived the rancher was counting his sheep, thousands of them. It was a long process and I felt stuck, but then I saw two of the sheep dogs away from their herd. The small dog really wanted to mate with the larger dog. He kept mounting her and she fought him off every time. The photograph that resulted from that experience is still about land use and sheep herding, but it is also about dogs mating when they were supposed to be watching sheep. And I like that.

Similarly, someone couldn’t hire me to go to the woods in Virginia to find and photograph a dead bear that looks human. For me, there has to be a discovery.

[We begin talking about the intersection of art and politics]

Lucas Foglia: I want my photographs to be connected to my values. I want my work to be relevant to the viewers. And above all I’m interested in making a great photograph. To quote Taryn Simon, the photograph has to be seductive.

Daniel Shea: I understand.

Lucas Foglia: With your work it’s the same thing. You traced the lines of the coal between mining and electricity generation. If you had just made photographs of the smoke stacks, then who would care? But when you made seductive photographs, people paid attention to the smoke stacks.

Daniel Shea: With a lot of work that is based on these very topical issues, a problem that I have is that the photographer looks at the subject with eyes that are too fresh or too eager. For example, like in Southeast Ohio, these smoke stacks have a very casual presence in the landscape and within the culture. If you grow up in the shadow of towering smoke stacks, they become just another element in the landscape, and you’re used to it, and it’s not this crazy, completely polarizing element that we tend to think of when we read about places online before visiting them. But if you treat the subject in a way that marries both being somewhere new and understanding the reality of wherever you are, that intersection generates interesting pictures, and narratives that open up a lot more for viewers to enter into. And people become more sincerely invested in the emotional and political issues that you are working with. Instead of a very didactic image-making process that people are turned off by.

Lucas Foglia: I think any photograph that is didactic, that tells you what to think, is paradoxically easy to forget. Good photographs rest on an ambiguity that makes you want to keep looking at them to figure them out. And I agree, tourists drive across a landscape, stop at a lookout point, take a picture and leave. The lookout points are obvious, predictable and beautiful. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it is a vantage point that I’m not interested in. I am interested when the landscape or the smoke stack is contextualized by everyday life.

Daniel Shea: I was looking at your website the other day and was trying to figure out what made your photographs feel personal, like what made me assume that you knew the people and that you had spent actual time with them, and that it was an investment. A lot of them don’t necessarily say that explicitly, but I always knew that for some reason. How important is the extended experience in these places with your subjects to how you want people to perceive your work?

Lucas Foglia: I like spending time in the places, and with the people, I photograph. I think the time I spend allows me to portray a wider range of events and emotions.

Daniel Shea: What is your relationship to activist circles? If we talk about this work in a more ideological context, larger than art, what is your personal relationship with these movements and these people? Were you ever an activist?

Lucas Foglia: Yes — I try to have the photographs I make point towards things I believe in or topics that I think are relevant. I like the fact that photographs can be used in so many different ways. I exhibit editioned prints in galleries, and publish the images in books and magazines. I give small prints back to the people I photograph, and I give digital copies to local and national organizations to use for advocacy. It might sound like a general statement, but I have seen people and causes benefit from the use of the photographs.

Daniel Shea: No, I totally get it.

[We talk for a while about current work life, how to make ends meet through a variety of work — magazine work, teaching, partnering with non-profits, selling work, but still trying to focus on working for people and companies that you are interested in and can stand behind.]

Daniel Shea: Is there a 5-year plan? Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Teaching?

Lucas Foglia: I’m going to keep on making photographs. Working on the book with Nazraeli Press has been a really energizing experience. And I have new projects that I am excited to start. I really enjoy teaching. Can I imagine myself becoming a professor at some point in the future? Sure, I can imagine really enjoying that. What’s your 5-year plan?

Daniel Shea: I feel ok in terms of a work-life, but I’m completely terrified about what I’m going to do next, because I have no idea. I’m in graduate school now, so I want to do a decent job at that and make better work.

Lucas Foglia: I think the best thing that graduate school can do for students is instill a culture that emphasizes making new work that matches their values and leaves room for discoveries; that cements a work ethic that continues after graduation.

Frank (Florida): The natural order of things is when a species gets dominant in its niche it overruns it completely to the point where it eats all of its food and then it crashes and burns. In my opinion, if we ever succeed in being sustainable, it will be the first non-natural thing we’ve ever done.