PUMPJACKS
2012—2025
Satellite portraits of oil pumpjacks, mechanical sentinels laboring day and night across the American landscape.
In Pumpjacks, Henner isolates the mechanical workhorses of the oil industry, machines whose tireless labour sustains the global appetite for energy. Seen from satellites, these individual pumpjacks resemble figures standing in vast fields, each marked by its own rhythm, form, and coded identity. The series transforms instruments of extraction into portraits — uncanny surrogates for human productivity — and asks whether these machines, endlessly repeating their gestures across the American landscape, have become the true emblems of our industrial age.
Medium: Unframed archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm. Dimensions: 32.7x40cm (12.9x15.7 inches)
Edition: 5 + 2 AP. Prices start at $1,000 each + Shipping. Includes a signed label.
Note: These individual pumpjacks have the same specifications but are seperate to those in the Eighteen Pumpjacks portfolio.
“With the world’s economies still so heavily reliant on oil, the public and industrial appetite for this most precious of commodities continues to be insatiable. Nowhere in the world has this hunger left its mark in such a pronounced and graphic manner as in the United States. Oil fields – comprising of thousands of pumpjacks, storage tanks, and pipelines – spread themselves across the landscape regardless of any natural or man-made obstacles that might stand in their way.
Seen from above, the American landscape resembles a canvas shaped by industry in a manner reminiscent of the dynamism and intensity of Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. It makes you wonder if the abstract expressionists’ inner landscapes were a response to the outer ones etched on the land, or if industrialists themselves consider the land to be a blank canvas on which to express themselves.
As we zoom-in and see these individual pumpjacks in isolation, they have an almost human quality. With a unique API code ascribed to all pumpjacks in the United States by the American Petroleum Institute, each one even has its own name.”
— Mishka Henner
Seen from above, the American landscape resembles a canvas shaped by industry in a manner reminiscent of the dynamism and intensity of Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. It makes you wonder if the abstract expressionists’ inner landscapes were a response to the outer ones etched on the land, or if industrialists themselves consider the land to be a blank canvas on which to express themselves.
As we zoom-in and see these individual pumpjacks in isolation, they have an almost human quality. With a unique API code ascribed to all pumpjacks in the United States by the American Petroleum Institute, each one even has its own name.”
— Mishka Henner
