Human Nature

While the planet is in peril, Lucas Foglia has traveled the world, capturing images that reveal humanity’s dependence on nature, even in the heart of overcrowded metropolises. An intrinsic need for wild spaces, even when those spaces are human-made

Lucas Foglia

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Trying to understand the effects that humans and nature can have on each other – a relationship that is at once collaborative and conflictual, unfolding through both natural and artificial paradises.

This is the goal of the book “Human Nature” by American photographer Lucas Foglia.

“It’s a project about our current relationship with wild landscapes,” Foglia explained. “About how we need them and how they are changing because of us.”

Born in 1983 in the United States, Foglia grew up on a small farm roughly 30 miles east of New York City.

“The forest bordering the farm was my childhood wilderness,” he recalled. “It was a wild place to play, overlooked by our neighbors who commuted to Manhattan.”

Then Hurricane Sandy came in 2012, flooding the farm and knocking down the oldest trees in the woods.

“Scientists linked the storm to climate change caused by human activity,” Foglia said. “I realized that if humans are changing the climate, then there is no place on Earth that hasn’t been altered by us. I went back through my archive and set aside some photographs that became the seeds for my third book.”

In “Human Nature”, each story is set in a different ecosystem. Forests, glaciers, deserts, fields, cities, and oceans: places where human power impacts nature and wild nature influences humans.

There is someone who sleeps on a rock near a glacier; others harvest cotton among wind turbines. There is volcanic lava, but also a stuffed deer in the hallway of a gray office.

It’s a connection between humans and nature, driven by the need to reclaim our wildest selves – even in a pool in the heart of a polluted city.