Ayesha Malik considers herself an American on paper, a Pakistani by heritage, and a Saudi by upbringing. But she calls herself an Aramcon.

Malik has spent most of her 28 years in Dhahran Camp, the exclusive gated community where employees of the Saudi oil giant Aramco live with their families. Some 10,000 people live in a community about half the size of San Francisco, an oasis of tree-lined cul-de-sacs, swimming pools, and Cub Scout troops. “It kind of looks like where you grew up, if you grew up in a suburban American town,” she says. “Just imagine that, and imagine that’s in Saudi Arabia, and suddenly you’re on another planet.”

It's a planet she documents beautifully in her new book ARAMCO: Above the Oil Fields.

Aramco produces some 10.5 million barrels of oil each day and holds reserves estimated at more than 260 billion barrels, making it the world’s largest oil company. The company built Dharhran Camp soon after its founding in 1933 to house expat employees. It offers all the amenities of suburbia, including tennis courts, bowing alleys, and other Western touches. “It was supposed to make you feel like you could just pop out from Kansas and come here and your life would be very comfortable,” Malik says.

Malik’s father landed a job with Aramco in 1980, and she grew up within its confines playing soccer and softball, cooling off at the pool after school, and learning to drive in the parking lot near her house, a privilege denied to most women in Saudi Arabia.

She never appreciated how unusual a place it is until moving to New York in 2007 to attend Parsons School of Design. During her visits home, she'd ride her bike through the community, casually snapping photos of anything that caught her eye. Her father retired in 2012 and moved the family to the capital, Riyadh, but she returned seven times last year to finish the project. She found the experience bittersweet. "I couldn’t just open the garage door, jump on my bed, and pass out from sweat anymore," she says.

Her surprising, almost surreal photographs reveal an insular community at the intersection of two cultures---a world Malik still inhabits, even if she now calls New York home. "When people ask me where I'm from, I hate giving them the answer," she says. "I always just thought I was an Aramcon."

Daylight Books will release ARAMCO: Above the Oil Fields August 15.