Exploitation of Natural Resources 02
This third Dossier is dedicated to oil and gas photo books from the Artphilein Library collection. It is part of our long-time research and collection of documentation of the exploitation of natural resources (in 2022 the first chapter was dedicated to mining rocks, minerals and coal). By viewing the books on display, scrolling through the images of the covers of the books reproduced here with a short caption, reading Davide Monteleone’s text, looking at his photographs, as well as Marco D’Anna’s disturbing shots featured at the beginning and end of this publication, the viewer will get a much clearer idea of the many problems and risks associated with the exploitation of oil and gas.
Potential Scenarios and future challenges
Davide Monteleone
On 27 September 2022, a bubbling gas patch appeared in the Baltic Sea. The enormous methane leak, resembling a huge Jacuzzi in the open sea, was the result of sabotage on Nord Stream pipeline, one of the crucial infrastructures for Europe’s energy supply transporting gas from Russia to Europe. The aerial shot taken by Swedish coastguard authorities looks like a huge white blob spreading across the deep blue Baltic Sea. The image transmitted across all media channels is dramatically reminiscent of the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings.
From an environmental point of view, the gas-line tampering will have an effect on the increase of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and thus on the global warming of the planet, but however serious they may seem, even experts seem to play down the risks of environmental impact caused over recent decades by incidents linked to fossil fuels. According to international leaders, the main concern seems instead to focus on the global security issues that such a threat entails; for the public, it increases the fear of uncertain and unaffordably more expensive energy supplies.
During the climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, science unequivocally confirmed the direct influence of human activity on climate change and, without a shadow of a doubt, attributed responsibility for such catastrophic effects on the environment to the use of fossil fuel energy. The dangers linked to the exploitation of our current forms of energy supply constitute an established concern in the scientific world, but have only recently made their way onto the agenda of political and social debate.
Up until only a few years ago, the environmental issue was often side-lined in favour of the need to secure sizeable supplies of raw fossil materials. After all, no other raw material is so closely associated with industrial globalisation and thus with the rise – and sometimes the fall – of entire nations as much as oil and gas. For these resources, wars have been fought, populations have been exploited in the extraction processes, entire landscapes have been destroyed and the atmosphere has been contaminated by enormous quantities of carbon dioxide that we are now attempting to reduce, capture and store.
In the field of photography, these vast and complex issues have been dealt with since the dawn of technical imagery for diametrically opposed purposes and reasons, and brought together in a wide range of books and collections. The De Pietri Artphilein Foundation collection has numerous volumes that, with different approaches, deal with the subject from a historical, social, industrial, commercial and even poetic stance. This short essay is the result of a review and a personal reflection of some of these books, and sets out to intersect aesthetic interests with the geopolitical and environmental dynamics that I have been concerned with throughout my twenty-year career in documentary photography.
Two books in particular, among the many in the collection, illustrate the development of the oil and gas’ oil and gas industry from a historical perspective: Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom and Photoalbum of the Soviets Land of Gas.
The former provides documentation of the first oil settlements in late nineteenth-century America, particularly those in Pennsylvania. The volume reconstructs the economic and social ferment linked to the discovery of energy sources that would pre-empt the global oil and gas rush, accompanied by international conflicts throughout the twentieth century and even more so in the twenty-first.
Photoalbum of the Soviets Land of Gas, on the other hand, is an almost propagandist volume published by the Soviet Ministry of Energy. It is an accurate compendium of heroic images of infrastructure and workers: a celebration of an entire country and its energy resources. The curiosity of the volume lies largely in its publication date: 1989. On the heels of the fall of the Berlin Wall and a few years prior to the dissolution of the Soviet utopia, in the midst of a near-catastrophic domestic economic crisis, party leaders were busy trumpeting their energy resources. In the current context, and with different communication strategies, I witnessed the same form of propaganda in 2014, when, immediately after Russia annexed Crimea and in the wake of Western sanctions and reactions, the Kremlin rushed to announce the most important energy deal in history: to supply China with its gas.
Through the two volumes, we may reflect on the geopolitical outlook of the two world powers over the course of the twentieth century. The US strategy has historically been geared towards securing substantial supplies when domestic provision was insufficient. Often masked behind an ideology of exporting democracy, the United States has triggered both direct and proximity conflicts of which the ultimate goal was access to and management of huge oil and gas reserves beyond their own national territories. One of the most visually compelling and dramatic photographic examples of ‘energy conflicts’ is undoubtedly the work in Kuwait by Brazilian photographer Sebastiaõ Salgado. It was 1991 and the crisis in the Middle East and the Gulf War were at the heart of world debate, when Iraqi soldiers set fire to over six hundred oil wells in Kuwait to hinder the advance of the US-led military coalition; Salgado documented the efforts to stop the fires through a series of apocalyptic images: the photographs provide a metaphor for energy consumption, environmental disaster and the violence of war.
On the other side of the world, first in the Soviet Union and then in Russia, the political and economic concern with fossil fuel reserves was rather to ensure domestic support of the industrial apparatus, and then only later to procure economic advantage by selling off such resources to the best buyer. On closer inspection, however, it is not hard to pick out a form of colonialism even in the Kremlin, albeit an internal one as Alexander Etkind defines it in Internal Colonisation: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Over the centuries, in fact, the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union extended their search for raw materials into remote areas of the country inhabited by Indigenous or non-Slavic peoples – suffice to think of the territories in the Arctic or the Caucasus where most of the resources come from today.
Rena Effendi's delicate and poetic book Liquid Land gives us a glimpse of this reality in a contemporary key. Here, the Azerbaijani author documents the economic boom of the independent country since 1991, but also reminds us of its past as a Soviet' colony’ in the images of the plants and technological traces of the 1930s. The narrative language is that of a contemporary reportage in square format, accompanied by poetic and evocative images of delicate and intimate moments of present life and past memories.
In addition to the economic and industrial approach, the historical context and the evolution of the political and social debate on environmental issues have prompted photographers to try their hand at narratives that no longer focus on energy development but rather on the relationship between resources, man and nature. Although the issue of energy and fossil fuels has long been associated with environmental issues, it is only in recent times that the correlation between the two has become a significant part of the narrative of photographic language. Until the late 1990s, reportages seemed to focus more on social aspects, and it is only with the collective development of an environmental consciousness that projects and volumes with aesthetics and narratives – focusing on the relationship between energy production and the environment – have emerged in photography.
In the works of Edward Burtinsky, we find perhaps the clearest and most compelling example of this shift in aesthetics and content. The Canadian photographer’s images certainly take their cue from the German tradition of the Düsseldorf School of photography, but by elevating the perspective to an aerial view, they expose the transformation of nature and the landscape, documenting the dramatic nature of the environmental damage caused by oil extraction, adopting an aesthetic of the sublime. This stylistic choice, which systematically conceals the work and impact on and of humans in the extraction process, has been subjected to criticism. Still, it is equally significant that – unlike previous narratives that have focused on human labour (see Salgado) – Burtinsky’s work focuses on the planet. The images seem to suggest that nature is now suffering, and the human species as a whole is responsible for these disasters and exploitation.
This shift in approach is consistent with the global debate on climate change and the need to identify sustainable alternatives to the use of fossil fuels: large multinational corporations, governments and humanity as a whole, almost without making a distinction between the exploiters and the exploited, as accomplices of a capitalist system that drives the desire for wealth, are responsible for the damage caused to the planet.
Since the last COP26 climate conference, many Western governments seemed to have come around to the need to take action, at least in theory. A series of actions and initiatives to encourage the energy transition seemed to have been set in motion, particularly in the developed countries of Northern Europe and North America. China itself, at least on paper, was willing to take action to diversify the origins of its energy sources.
Over the past two years, I have documented start-ups and government initiatives committed to capturing CO2 by harnessing geothermal energy from Icelandic volcanoes, Norwegian gas giants exploiting the same mining technologies to store CO2 in the deep sea, and scientists experimenting with the use of algae or solar energy and carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Many of these initiatives are at an experimental stage and their economic viability is still a long way off, but they remain necessary albeit – in some cases – controversial initiatives.
On my last trip to Norway, I counted over 100 Teslas in less than two days, and in Sardinia over the last year, I have seen fields once used for pasture and agriculture give way to extensive wind and solar farms. In short, the transition seems to have begun, yet not everyone is aware that a single wind turbine requires about 4.7 tonnes of copper, or that a car battery requires eight kilograms of lithium.
Demand for the resources needed for the green transition, often called ‘critical minerals’, will rise by over 400% over the next fifteen years.[1] Many of the reserves of these minerals are in developing countries whose fate lies in the ability of their governments to manage them. The scenarios are not dissimilar to those that led us to the rush for black gold. Ever-increasing demand will lead economically strong nations and multinationals to adopt forms of colonisation, which may – as has happened before – lead to war conflicts, social tensions and further disproportionate distribution of wealth.
A more optimistic outlook, however, might suggest a solution through which these new resources could be exploited sustainably and distributed fairly for global well-being. But is it believable that the interests of multinational corporations or oil-rich states might be set aside for the global common good? The events of this last year, including the conflict in Ukraine itself, would seem to suggest otherwise.
From this outlook, we might reflect on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not only in terms of Putin’s foolish desire to piece back together the glories of the bygone Soviet Union or to re-establish a world order, but also the need to defend its energy and economic interests from a West intent on beating its addiction to Russian gas. The popular response in fact seems to support this hypothesis: at the first sky-high energy bill, the average European citizen forgets all about global warming and melting ice and starts clamouring for Russian gas. In the meantime, developing countries, which are now being offered funding by global economic organisations to build sustainable energy infrastructure, respond with suspicion. Why should they engage in costly investments after having been plundered of their resources for years?
These issues have always been the subject of interest in photography. Industrial development itself and the invention of photography coincide from a temporal point of view, and the applications of the latter in documenting technological and industrial progress have ranged from the purely documentary to commercial, propagandistic and more recently activist intentions. The role of photography in this imminent – albeit complex – transition process will not shy away from using the same narrative constructions that characterised the oil and gas era. Companies that produce wind turbines and solar panels will offer their glossy images of innovative and futuristic installations; documentary filmmakers will scramble to witness the future's environmental disasters and denounce new social injustices.
In this new scenario that seems to place the planet and the whole of humanity at the centre of this transition, the visual and artistic narrative also appears to be starting to apply new strategies, including the use of new technologies for image capture, collaborative works that include the participation of local communities, and a focus that seems to be more on activism than mere documentation.
In Decolonizing Nature, T. J. Demos questions the artistic practice that has dealt with environmental issues over the years. The reflection that emerges suggests that results in the past have been discouraging because they have been self-referential and often bound up in aesthetic and pedagogical stereotypes. Demos seems to suggest that the need to subvert the fate of our planet and the global approach to energy consumption also passes through an artistic and visual practice capable of forming a global consciousness that acknowledges the collective commitment necessary for this fundamental transition and of avoiding repeating past mistakes.
To conclude, how and when we will be able to give up fossil fuel resources is still a moot point. Geopolitical dynamics and economic interests are intertwined with objective technological difficulties and social imbalances. The real solution to meeting the world’s energy needs, whatever the source, seems once again to be a problem of consumption. We should simply learn to use less!
[1] Data published by the IEA (International Energy Agency).