Lucas Foglia: Frontcountry

January 20, 2016 | in Magazine

“I met George in Diamond Valley, Nevada. George raised cattle for most of his life. In his retirement, he enjoys chasing forest fires. We drove on dirt roads with dust coming up through the floor of his truck, and then stopped at the hill with the fire burning on the other side. He told me very confidently that he had safety provisions. I asked, “What safety provisions?” And he said: “I have two bottles of water, a Coke, a candy bar, a shovel and a handgun.” In the photograph, which is on the cover of "Frontcountry," the fire cloud arcs over both of us.

“The image of Casey and Rowdy horse training, in some ways, comes closest to symbolizing ranching today. The landscape is still iconic, the horse is rearing, but Casey is trying really hard not to fall off his horse.”

“I like to spend time with the people I photograph, to stay for long enough to take part in everyday life. It was Tommy’s idea to shoot coyotes from the top of a fence pole. I photographed Tommy the moment before he fell off the pole with a loaded gun.”

“I watched as Adam, a Wyoming school teacher, aimed a rifle at a cow. Just before Adam pulled the trigger, I pressed the shutter release. The sound of my camera made the cow look at me. I made another photograph, and a second later Adam fired his gun. That moment of eye contact with the cow felt the most memorable, almost human.”

“There are still more cows than people in rural Nevada. And the areas I photographed between 2006 and 2013 in Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, New Mexico and Montana are some of the least populated regions in the United States.”

“Most of the cowboys I met in the American West were from Mexico or Peru, working under guest worker visas.”

“When I first traveled to Wyoming in 2009, I expected to meet cowboys trailing animals past ghost towns and wilderness. People in the towns I visited knew that what was happening there was unbelievable. In the middle of a global recession, while ranchers were fighting the economy and the weather, almost everyone could get a job at the mines: coal, oil and natural gas in Wyoming; copper and gold in Nevada.”

$"At the same time, the nuggets of gold that made the American West famous have been gone from Nevada for generations. In the Wyoming oil fields, companies pull one hundred barrels of water out of the ground to extract one barrel of oil. With modern technologies, like fracking, land that wasn’t valuable a few decades ago is now being drilled or mined."$ "At the same time, the nuggets of gold that made the American West famous have been gone from Nevada for generations. In the Wyoming oil fields, companies pull one hundred barrels of water out of the ground to extract one barrel of oil. With modern technologies, like fracking, land that wasn’t valuable a few decades ago is now being drilled or mined."

"It is now profitable to mine gold if there is 1/10th of an ounce of gold dust in a two thousand pound rock. To extract gold, the rock is crushed and mixed with cyanide. Because the nuggets of gold are gone, and because the prices are so high, companies are digging the biggest holes in the world to find smaller and smaller things, leaving pits where there were mountains."

"I expected cowboys to be nomads, herding animals over a wild landscape. I learned pretty quickly that most ranchers had homes with mortgages. I also learned that every mine closes eventually. When a mine closes, the company leaves and people have to move. Miners are the modern day nomads, following jobs across the country."

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The vital connection between landscape and the people who rely on it to sustain livelihood is a central theme in Lucas Foglia’s exceptional series, Frontcountry. Raised on a farm in upstate New York, the photographer’s earliest childhood memories are of playing cowboy. Foglia envisioned capturing that cherished image of the cowboy when he began this series.

Making his way through sparsely settled areas of the American West from 2006 to 2013, he photographed the people who reside in this stretch of land and the wide-ranging effects mining booms have had on their lives. The images in Frontcountry were taken in Montana, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Idaho and New Mexico. Foglia shared reflections on his experiences and feelings while working on Frontcountry. —Austin McManus

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Originally published in the February, 2016 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, available here.

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