My fascination with these machines never really stopped. Given the central role oil continues to play in our lives and in our geopolitics, I've decided to make a selection of these works available as unique editions — with the price of each print indexed to the monthly average price of Brent Crude oil.
Mishka Henner, Levelland Oil Field, Hockley County, Texas. From Fields, 2012–13
HOW IT BEGAN
I began using satellite imagery in my work in 2010. Platforms such as Google Earth offered views of the planet in unprecedented photographic detail and opened up ways of representing subjects that were otherwise difficult to see clearly.
One of the first subjects I focused on was oil fields. Their scale was so vast that satellite imagery seemed like the only way to show their impact on the landscape. From above, roads, pipelines, wells, tanks and pumpjacks appeared as a vast circuitry laid over fields, deserts and towns. The result was Fields (2012–13), a series of large landscape prints depicting North American oil fields in extraordinary detail.
The imagery was detailed enough to isolate individual pumpjacks. From above, there is a simple illusion at work: what we see is often not the pumpjack itself, but its shadow. These small machines become dark marks on the land, each one placed within its own field of colour, texture and geometry.
THE PUMPED BOOK
Mishka Henner, Pumped, 2012
What struck me was the range of places in which pumpjacks appeared. Agricultural land, forests, orchards, cities, back yards, airports — pretty much every conceivable location. They were everywhere, working quietly in the background.
I first published these images in a small artist's book called Pumped, made as part of a series of books produced by ABC Artists' Books Cooperative to celebrate the 75th birthday of Ed Ruscha. The title of each book in the series ended with the letters "ed"; my contributions were Pumped and Richtered. The books were later shown in Ed Ruscha: Books & Co. at Gagosian Gallery in 2013.
Ed Ruscha: Books & Co., Gagosian Gallery, New York, March–April 2013
EIGHTEEN PUMPJACKS
That same year, I produced a portfolio of eighteen prints titled Eighteen Pumpjacks. The portfolio was made in an edition of 18 and echoed Barnett Newman's 18 Cantos, made fifty years earlier. While working on Fields and Eighteen Pumpjacks, it struck me that satellite imagery revealed an external landscape that would have been invisible to Abstract Expressionist painters like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Helen Frankenthaler, but which seemed to resonate with the interior landscapes they were expressing.
One of the earliest collectors of Eighteen Pumpjacks were LA-based collectors Mary and Dan Solomon. In 2018, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. acquired a portfolio from their collection. That portfolio is currently on view in Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography at the National Gallery of Art, running 23 May through 23 August 2026.
Mishka Henner, Eighteen Pumpjacks porfolio, 2013
Barnett Newman, Eighteen Cantos: title page, 1963–4. © ARS, NY and DACS, London
THE PRICING MECHANIC
Eighteen Pumpjacks is a complete work, but my fascination with these tireless machines never really stopped. I continued locating and isolating individual pumpjacks across the United States. I have decided to release a selection of these works as unique editions of one, with the price of each print indexed to the monthly average price of Brent Crude oil.
The price is not fixed because the subject is not fixed. Oil rises and falls. Its value changes constantly. These prints follow that movement. A picture of a pumpjack becomes tied to the market value of the commodity it extracts.
The work depicts oil infrastructure, but it also enters the logic of oil pricing. It is a photograph, a landscape, a portrait of a machine, and a small market instrument. Slightly ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than most systems of value once you look at them closely.
THE OBJECT
API 21931640 Leeper (Glorieta), TX
These are images of individual machines, but they point to something larger: the scale of extraction, the abstraction of landscape, and the way industrial systems turn land, labour and energy into numbers.
Each print is produced as an archival pigment print and is available only once. Once sold, that image will not be offered again in this edition format.
These are not a more accessible version of the Eighteen Pumpjacks portfolio. The portfolio was complete — eighteen works sold as a single artwork. These prints stand alone. Each has its own API code, its own location, its own field. And each one carries something the portfolio prints don't: a price that will be different next month, because the price of oil will be different next month.