‘This little town has nothing. It’s dying on the vine. But when the company opens a mine here, it’ll bring jobs and make everything bigger and better. There are people who want that boost to the community. I’m not one of them. The mine will ruin this mountain and you’ll never find land this beautiful anywhere else.’ Randy Stowell, Big Springs Ranch, Oasis, Nevada 2012.

Between 2006 and 2013, Lucas Foglia travelled throughout rural Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming, some of the least populated regions in the United States. Frontcountry is a photographic account of people living in the midst of a mining boom that is transforming the modern American West.
Foglia's work is driven by a desire to tell stories, it conveys an understanding of the land as a resource and an inquisitiveness as to how people make a living from it. The images feel rooted in the romance of the American landscape, yet his work has a signature that always refers back to its inhabitants, reflecting the artist's personable nature and patient observation. His practice continues in the line of previous American social documentary photographers whose work, in book and print form, is intended as a prolonged and measured examination of a theme.

Lucas Foglia (b.1983) was raised on a small family farm in New York and is currently based in San Francisco. A graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Art, his work is in the permanent collections of the V&A Museum (currently exhibiting in Room 100), Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Pilara Foundation, San Francisco and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Fine Art. His first series, A Natural Order, was exhibited at Michael Hoppen Contemporary and published by Nazraeli Press in 2012.