Photography by Lucas Foglia

Lucas Foglia just finished his first year in the Yale graduate program and his series Re-Wilding should probably be familiar to you by now, since it’s been making its way around the internet. Foglia was raised on a small family farm in Huntington, Long Island. A graduate of Brown University and a current MFA candidate at Yale School of Art, Foglia exhibits nationally. His photographs are included in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Fine Art, Newport Art Museum, Margulies Collection, Light Work, Woodstock Center for Photography, David Winton Bell Gallery of Brown University, Starr Foundation, and Sprint Systems of Photography. Foglia has been an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work, and recent awards include the “Top 50 Photographers” chosen by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, “Photography Now” from the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Magenta Foundation’s “Flash Forward 2008.”



About Lucas Foglia


I grew up with my extended family on a farm in suburban Long Island. Influenced by the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960’s, 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. At the same time, we remained connected to the electrical grid and, when I left for college, my immediate family owned four cars, five computers and one nonworking television.
Since 2006 I have visited, befriended, photographed and interviewed a network of people in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia who have responded to environmental concerns by moving to rural areas and adopting wilderness or homesteading lifestyles. My subjects vary in their religious beliefs and cultural practices but they all share a desire for self-sufficiency. Most of my subjects live off-the-grid, build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby springs and hunt, gather or grow their own food. I am fascinated by the points of intersection between their ideals, the ubiquitous availability of the mainstream world and the hard work necessary to maintain an alternative lifestyle.