The changing landscapes of the modern American cowboy

Foglia neither idealises the cowboys nor reviles the miners, but his images show some of the issues that arise when these two very different industries share the same terrain. “The TS Ranch in Nevada is owned by a subsidiary of Newmont Mining Corporation. The ranch uses water from the company’s nearby gold mines to irrigate alfalfa. The alfalfa hay they grow is fed to over five thousand cattle,” he explains, as an example of mutual support.

“The problem is that the mining goes from boom to bust,” warns Clifford Tell, who now lives next to a gold mine. “I’ve watched the cycle. A company opens a mine near a small town. The mine brings out-of-town workers who need stores, schools and doctors’ offices. The boom ends and the company leaves. The miners leave and the other jobs leave too. The land is scarred and the town is scarred.”

It’s an issue close to Foglia’s heart, after growing up with a family that farmed, canned food and bartered their harvest for goods while malls and supermarkets developed all around. Foglia’s first photobook, the acclaimed A Natural Order, dealt with individuals who had chosen to leave cities and suburbs and live off the grid; his second is devoted to those who grew up in the country and decided to stay. “I keep coming back to the question of how rural communities navigate modernity and how landscape shapes people into who they are,” he says.

He started Frontcountry while completing A Natural Order, which was published in 2012 by Nazraeli Press; working on both books simultaneously helped to “keep each one feeling fresh”, he says, and he chose different styles for each. “In A Natural Order, people were at the forefront of almost every image; in Frontcountry, I wanted to treat everything – people, animals, land – in the same manner,” he explains. “The photographs have a greater depth of field, a wider angle of view and more activity.”

 

Foglia avoided setting himself a shot list for Frontcountry, drawing instead on his years of conversations with the cowboys and, in doing so, leaving room for surprises to emerge. “For instance, I visited two Peruvian sheepherders, Oscar and Wilson, who trailed across the high desert in Wyoming,” he says. “The photograph I made is of their dogs mating when they are supposed to be guarding sheep.”

Foglia shot 60,000 images but included just 60 in the book, carefully editing out “any photograph that’s didactic, that tells the viewer what to think”. He hopes his more subtle approach will prove more memorable and “provoke people to look, to ask questions and to find their own answers”, and to this end, has provided a list of news sources and maps at the end of the book. Online he’s taken this a step further and linking the title of each photograph to a Google search, both to provide more information and ensures the information stays up to date. As history and his project all too clearly show, nothing is set in stone.

See more of Lucas’ work here.

First published in the March 2014 issue of BJP. Buy it now.

Rebecca Warger

Rebecca Warger is the Marketing Director for 1854 Media/ British Journal of Photography. She has worked on creative initiatives across Australia, Argentina and London.