Visit to an Oil Field in Purissima Hills, USA Possibly 1908

Geldolph Adriaan Kessler took this photograph, Visit to an Oil Field in Purissima Hills, USA, without stating a date. The sepia tones feel so immediate, don’t they? I can almost see Kessler holding his camera, trying to capture the vastness of the oil field with its little structures and a car. It feels like he's trying to freeze a moment in time, a specific view of this industrial landscape. I wonder what Kessler was thinking when he took this shot. Was he marveling at the ambition and the scale of it all, or was he perhaps feeling a sense of unease about what this extraction meant for the land? There's something very real about the way this image documents an encounter, almost like a snapshot from a road trip. I love the way it mixes industry with the natural world, and the way it makes you think about how we shape the environment. The photograph is a testament to how artists see, think, and experience the world. Artists are always in conversation, aren’t they? Each one inspiring the next, allowing for multiple interpretations.