The Sky is Bigger in Texas

The Sky is Bigger in Texas is a visual investigation into the disappearance of the landscape, tied to car-dependent culture and the ecological disasters it fuels in the Permian Basin in West Texas.

I had initially set out to work on the liminal space between bodies and the desert landscapes of the West, but within the first hours driving from Houston to Marfa, I abandoned my European gaze to slip into what I already knew of Texas. It felt like rediscovering an old friend, full of joy, and at the same time marked by the realization that time and distance had made me forget its flaws. Here, bodies have vanished; people don’t walk, they drive. Instinctively, I knew my subject wasn’t the body but the car. The body moves through the world by car, and it is through it that one experiences the landscape.

I searched and reflected on the road trip, on the mythology of the open road, to find the meeting point between landscapes destroyed by oil extraction and the breathtaking vistas of Big Bend National Park.

Thanks to a local journalist, I gathered a few rancher contacts, and one of them, Schuyler Wright, agreed to show me the issues caused by shale gas production on his land, pollution, drying-up of water sources, and the destruction of the landscape. Through his story and his family’s history, I came to understand why toxic lakes are now growing over former pastures.

Schuyler Wright grew up on a ranch in northwest Texas, on land his family has owned for three generations. The story begins during the 1929 crisis, when his grandfather had to sell the subsurface rights to an oil company in order to survive. At the time, no one understood the long-term consequences of such a decision. In Texas, legislation is so favorable to oil companies that this transfer of mineral rights is indefinite, unlike in Louisiana, for example, where such rights cannot exceed ten years. Today, Schuyler and his siblings face the poisoned inheritance of those choices.

On his land, as on the properties of many landowners between Grandfalls and Imperial, old abandoned oil and gas wells are releasing highly toxic water. This “produced water,” generated by shale gas extraction, rises to the surface through poorly plugged wells. Laden with salts (up to 200,000 mg/L), heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury), and radioactive elements (radium-226 and radium-228), it kills vegetation and contaminates the soil. Every year, the pollution plumes expand. Boehmer Lake, a toxic body of water created by these leaks, grows by several hectares annually, joining other artificial lakes that have appeared over the decades.

Texas has more than 780,000 oil and gas wells, including around 7,000 that are officially abandoned and unplugged—a number experts say is vastly underestimated. These wells serve as direct pathways for groundwater and soil contamination. Plugging a well can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $500,000, a cost oil companies often avoid by shifting responsibility to landowners or disappearing once extraction ends.

Faced with this silent ecological disaster, Schuyler Wright has become involved in legislative advocacy. He campaigns for oil companies to be held accountable for sealing their abandoned wells. His goal is to strengthen regulations to prevent these leaks from continuing to poison soil and water. But in a state where the oil industry generates more than $15 billion in annual revenue—and where the Railroad Commission* is funded by the oil and gas sector—it is an uphill battle.

*The Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) is the regulatory agency overseeing the oil and gas industry in Texas. Despite its name, it has not managed railroads since 2005. Its primary role is to supervise the extraction, production, and distribution of energy resources, including natural gas, oil, pipelines, and mining. It is frequently criticized for its close ties to the very industry it is meant to regulate, as a large portion of its funding comes from oil and gas companies.

On the other side of my project lie the grand landscapes of the Southwest Texas desert—an immensity that summons both myth and the raw reality of the territory. The winding road between Marfa and Balmorhea, the miles swallowed across nearly empty stretches, and the idea I carried of the road trip.

Alone behind the wheel, the images passing through the windshield layered themselves onto all the others I had seen before: the photographs of artists captivated by the West, the wide shots of Hollywood cinema, the romanticized visions of exploration. This initiatory journey was also mine, and yet it compelled me to deconstruct the glamorous image of the road trip. Behind these postcard views hides another reality, a territory marked and transformed. The beautiful landscape imagery we consume, in magazines or Instagram feeds, has its counterpart in landscapes that have been destroyed. Oil wells, extraction sites, roads carved through once-unspoiled land: these idealized visions are, paradoxically, part of what contributes to their destruction.

By submerging my landscape film rolls in shale gas produced water, I can overlay the reality of destruction onto our fantasized images.