“I want this book to show how we need wild places even if they have been shaped by us. We need to care for nature and adapt to the changes we have caused.” Foglia makes images of the world between paradise and disaster. 

One photograph depicts a prisoner at Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex, retrieving a guinea fowl chick that has escaped through a chain link fence. Foglia said he’d gone to Rikers because he’d heard about three organic gardens there. “Riots and the lockdowns were happening in neighboring buildings,” he says. “The gardens felt like an oasis.” He also photographed a neuroscience experiment in Utah that found that spending time in wild areas enhances cognition, even after a person returns to a city.

Of course, Foglia is hardly immune to the draw of pristine nature. “The last photographs I made for the book,” he says, “were along the southeastern coast of the big island of Hawaii. There is hot lava hitting the ocean. There are people building homes on recently cooled lava. There are ecovillages in the jungle. There are secessionists claiming independence from the United States. I went there to photograph because the area has the cleanest air on earth.”