Hundreds of people funneled into the Merck Animal Health Arena at Horseshoe Park & Equestrian Centre in Queen Creek, Arizona, after the Art of the Cowgirl main event on January 21. They sat in rows.
Famed portrait photographer
Dan Winters shifted his focus to a new character, the Permian Basin, as the storied region weathered a historic oil bust.
Pump jack with
flare in the distance near Knott.
Photograph by Dan Winters
The Permian Basin has a way of making you feel small. The sheer scale of its geography, the never-ending horizon, that big sky. Traveling through this dusty, mostly flat, nearly treeless region of West Texas, one gets a sense of being at sea, adrift in an expanse of red dirt, the monotony broken occasionally by shin oak, sand dunes, pump jacks, the steel spikes of rig derricks, columns of flame from natural gas flares, and, more recently, the long, slender blades of wind turbines. Even for those of us who grew up there, such enormity can be overwhelming, almost numbing. It can make it hard to see the place.