In 2009 the photographer Lucas Foglia got lost in the Western wilds of Wyoming. For Foglia, who was raised on Long Island, the West was bigger and harsher than any landscape he’d ever seen. In a piece in The New York Times, Foglia talked about a realization he had. Folks in the West, he noticed, take care of each other; the unforgiving landscape requires it. Foglia set out on a four-year project to photograph the close network of individuals that makes up the West.
Over time, he witnessed a lot of changes. Sometimes, it was the rapid change of the weather. Other times, it was watching jobs and homes come and go. This all left Foglia with a couple of questions: “What is going to allow people to continue to live in the rural American West and how are we going to preserve or use the wild land we have left?”
To view The New York Times slideshow of Foglia's work, clickhere.