As anyone who’s driven the stretch of Interstate 20 from Midland to Odessa can attest, there’s a lot of monotony in that landscape. Yet beneath that monotony, there’s also a certain inhuman, sinister beauty, less seen than felt. And beneath the beauty? Oil, gas, and a whole lot of money to be made.

It’s a tricky mission for any artistic endeavor to do justice to all three of those visual strata in the Permian Basin—to properly evoke the flat repetition of eyesore industrial infrastructure, to capture what makes the region visually poignant despite all of that, and, finally, to keep a keen eye trained on the economic forces at play. That’s the challenge photographers Jason Reed and Barry Stone set for themselves with Boom and Dust, their recent 128-panel foldout photography book. Read More