A long time ago I drove south down California State Route 33 from Coalinga to Taft, mostly just to see what was there. I’m glad I did: what’s there is an often-surreal landscape of pumpjacks, storage tanks, and tubing stretching for miles in each direction in the hot Central Valley sunshine. Parts of outer Bakersfield (e.g. Oildale) are much the same, if a little more suburban.
For years I wanted to capture the surreal experience of driving through these oilfields, but it wasn’t until video cameras got to be cheap enough and small enough for me to be able to safely and easily attach them to my car that I could really do it. This is the result (with a soundtrack by a friend of mine, Stephen M. Duffy).
People ask if I slowed the footage down. No, I just drove very slowly down the highways and roads, often having to wait for anything up to fifteen minutes at a time for a lull in the traffic so I wouldn’t get in the way of a speeding oil tanker, produce truck, or huge SUV.