Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography
Website: lucasfoglia.com
Lucas Foglia was born in 1983 on Long Island, New York, and grew up on his family’s farm thirty miles from Manhattan — a household rooted in the back-to-the-land ethos of the 1960s and 70s, with wood heat, canning, bartering, and food grown on site. He received a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University in 2005 and an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2010. He has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since, and is currently a faculty member in the MFA Fine Arts program at California College of the Arts. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships (2019, 2024), an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, and was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet in 2019. His work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, LACMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, among others.
Foglia is a documentary and fine art photographer whose practice centers on what he calls “stories about people in nature.” Working in color across extended, multi-year projects, he combines portraiture and landscape to examine how people organize their lives in relation to the natural world — whether off-grid communities in the American South, ranchers and miners in the rural West, neuroscientists measuring the cognitive benefits of nature exposure, or families rebuilding after volcanic lava flows on Hawaii’s Big Island. His photographs are lyrical and unhurried, resisting sensationalism in favor of careful observation and genuine proximity to his subjects. He has described his practice as a form of advocacy as well as art: he regularly shares his photographs with the people he documents, with news organizations, and with environmental organizations, extending the work beyond the gallery context. His six published monographs span from 2012 to 2025.
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