Lucas Foglia’s new Wild West

For Lucas Foglia, who was born in 1983 and grew up in Huntingdon, Long Island, 30 miles from Manhattan, the American West was a mythological place, largely created by Hollywood, but still a physical territory, out there to be discovered. So in 2006, the year after he graduated from Brown University, he set off on a journey that took him to North Carolina, down to Florida, across to New Mexico and then up through Texas, Wyoming and Nevada. “What I expected when I went there was a frontier,” he says. “I expected wilderness; people living on the edge of it. I imagined cowboys and ghost towns. And what I encountered was a mining boom.”