Photography and words by Lucas Foglia
Homeschooling chalkboard, Tennessee.
Between 2006 and 2010, the photographer and artist Lucas Foglia travelled throughout the southeastern United States photographing and interviewing a network of people who left cities and suburbs to live off the grid.
Jasmine, Hannah and Vicki picking jewelweed, Tennessee.
Family portrait with the photograph George took of Christina at their wedding, Tennessee.
» 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. But while my family followed many of the principles of the back-to-the-land movement, by the time I was eighteen we owned three tractors, four cars and five computers. This mixture of the modern world in our otherwise rustic life made me curious to see what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like. «
General store, Tennessee.
» Motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs or the global economic recession, these people chose to build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby springs, and hunt, gather, or grow their own food. «
Patrick and Anakeesta, Tennessee.
» All the people in my photographs are working to maintain a self-sufficient lifestyle, but 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.«
Creek, Kevin's land, Virginia.
Todd after a haircut, North Carolina; Tod’s vegetable oil van, North Carolina.
Lucas Foglia (b. 1983) grew up on a family farm in New York and is currently based in San Francisco. He graduated with a MFA in Photography from Yale University and with a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University. His photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe, and are in the permanent collections of museums including the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Foglia’s first monograph, A Natural Order (Nazraeli Press, 2012), and his second monograph, Frontcountry (Nazraeli Press, 2014), were published to international critical acclaim. He is represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York and Michael Hoppen Contemporary, London.
lucasfoglia.com
National Geographic, Wildroots homestead, North Carolina.
» 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. «
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