A Natural Order

It’s the 1980s, and young Lucas is growing up on a small farm in the state of New York. Gradually, the family home, which used to be isolated in the countryside, becomes encircled by a rapidly expanding city. This childhood on the perimeter is suddenly at the centre of a conflict between a life lived close to nature and city life. It provides the foundation for the photographic work of this Yale Art School graduate.

In 2006, Lucas Foglia started out in the south-eastern United States, on a project which would last four years. He lived with and photographed these voluntary Robinson Crusoes, men and women who had chosen to leave the towns and suburbs behind. They lived cut off from a society in which they did not recognize themselves, or which rejected them. Without refusing science and technological progress, they adopted other ways of subsisting, consuming and even educating themselves. As Lucas Foglia says, “They don’t reject the modern world at all. It’s more that they want to live apart from it and choose the bits they want to take with them”.