Artist Statement

Amanda Lucier (American, b. 1980) is a photojournalist whose work is rooted in the American West, with particular emphasis on the relationship between women and landscape. For the past decade she has covered wildfires, fentanyl, homelessness, and ranching, primarily for the New York Times.

Growing up on the East Coast, she spent summers on the Williamsfork River in Colorado, wandering the sagebrush and fly fishing. Now based in Oregon, she is an avid elk and deer hunter and bird hunts over her Italian Spinone, Ada.

Her work moves through the fault lines between urban and rural America — the entangled economies, ecologies, and cultures whose tension defines so much of contemporary Western life.

Her first monograph, Tidewater (2026), returns to the beginning: five years as a staff photographer in Virginia, where she spent most of her time waiting in the corners of people's lives, making pictures in between the news.

She is currently photographing across the West, documenting the economic forces reshaping ranch culture and the women and young people navigating them. Faced with fights over water rights, rising land prices, and climate pressure, a new generation is deciding what ranching becomes, or whether it survives at all.