Where can we locate the power in seeing oil? This may seem like a simple statement, yet the power in seeing oil and controlling its representation has had profound political implications in the modern era. Since its establishment in 1921, the British Petroleum (BP) Archive has become the official repository of the British-controlled multinational gas and oil company’s historical records.¹ Its carefully tailored media practices, comprising still photography, nonfiction and fiction films, newsreels, print publications, and monthly magazines, offer a seemingly comprehensive documentary outlook on the company’s past.² The BP Archive, which is now housed at the University of Warwick’s Modern Record Centre, holds BP’s film and photography production from the late nineteenth and twentieth century, serving as a portal to the infrastructural, social, and political development of the oil industry in Iran and across West Asia.

My entry point into the lasting ecological and social disruption caused by the British-controlled oil project in Iran and West Asia departs from British Petroleum’s documentary approach to its archive. However, looking at the BP Archive as a technology of knowledge production makes visible how it has shaped ways of seeing and knowing the worlds that British oil operations imagined, built, and destroyed.³ To disentangle this relationship between visuality, authority, and the archive, it is useful to bring forward the material connections between the political economy of oil and its representation. Drawing on the concept of “scopic regimes”—visually and culturally grounded ways of seeing the world—I chart how different states, oil companies, and political movements have visualized oil infrastructure over time. Laura Hindelang has previously examined the visual strategies adopted by oil companies in print media that have historically “decoupled the sites, the power relations, and the politics of extraction from the ways in which the advantages of fossil energy in daily life were showcased, and ultimately from the social, political, and ecological consequences of extracting and burning petroleum that we face today.”⁴ Brian Larkin describes how, once we note how oil infrastructures “[store] within them forms of fantasy and desire,” we can see beyond the built to identify how “the political can be constituted through other means.”⁵ Larkin’s ethnographic approach to oil infrastructure helps frame how Western oil companies and their postcolonial successors harboured cultural fantasies about the ‘power in seeing oil.’

Oil companies employed visual technologies, such as aerial photogrammetry, ethnographic films, and geological surveys, that also deliberately framed impressions of nature and people. BP’s visual and textual archives carefully organized its oil infrastructures and labour force into distinct racial and ethnic categories. By outlining the “psychic import, social dimension of vision, and its production of subjectivity,” it becomes clear how BP regulated, following Nicholas Mirzoeff, the “differences among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see” into one essentializing vision.⁶ Furthermore, positioning scopic regimes as evolving visual paradigms rooted in cultural frameworks, Martin Jay once argued that Western modernity should be understood as a “contested terrain, rather than as a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices.⁷ In examining the organization of image archives like BP’s, the notion of a scopic regime can help challenge Western hegemonic narratives of petromodernity and their perceptions of the “Other.” To this end, this photo essay charts the spatial, visual, and material processes that form BP’s totalizing vision of oil infrastructure, and how its archive formulated power relations between controlling and visualizing oil.

For instance, panorama images were common in BP’s photographic practice, meticulously recording industrial buildings, refinery facilities, and oil fields to create their totalizing vision of oil. An industrial-realist optic pervades their official Public Relations albums, which were largely concerned with picturing an unencumbered visual field of oil and its production. The panoramic mode, a common approach for the Public Relations department’s photographs, emphasized capturing the totality of the oil infrastructure in as little as two diptychs to photographs consisting of eight plates. Each photographic plate simultaneously can be joined to form a complete image of the landscape or industrial operations. This fragmented continuity of the panoramic perspective implies a sense of mastery over space and time and a linear understanding of place.

Since their inception, panoramic modes of representation across pictorial and photographic practices have been deeply enmeshed with imperialism.¹ In a recent study, Tim Barringer notes how “[t]he origins of panoramic drawing techniques lay in utilitarian practices of the British military. Prospect views of potential battlefields were carefully recorded in graphite and watercolour from a high vantage point. Artists associated with colonial endeavours often retained the same sovereign position, which later also characterized colonial photography.” From its origins in drawing and painting, the panoramic transplanted viewers into an experience of looking at landscapes, urban wonders, and wars with an “all-seeing eye”; it embodied and promised a boundless expansiveness both visually and thematically.² Emerging as spectacles during an era marked by conflicts among competing global empires, three-dimensional panoramic spaces offered nineteenth-century audiences an immersive experience within recognizable landscapes and historical events. As Barringer writes, “The panorama provided an insistent, phantasmagorical juxtaposition of “here” and “there”—home and abroad; familiar and exotic; imperial center and periphery; metropole and province; civilization and its alleged others. What the global panorama could do better than any other medium was to supply an experiential equivalent—a sublime simulacrum—of distant events, experienced in the round.”³

Panoramic viewing has been central to modern visuality, extending from painting and drawing in the late eighteenth century to panoramic photography that captured expansive landscapes in a single glance. In early British colonial photography in the Indian subcontinent, panoramic images reflected Orientalist framings of architecture and battlefields, suppressing references to local populations and political rebellions.⁴ Notably, looking closely at the BP’s panoramas gradually brings the shadowy presence of workers among the buildings. Yet by capturing the vast oil-industrial landscape in a series of frames, these photographs have a monumentalizing effect, producing, like earlier panoramic photographs, an abstracted image that minimizes the massive production of labour within its frame.

In addition to the panorama, BP also pictured the development of the oil towns and oilfields from an aerial perspective. It produced an overwhelming number of aerial urban surveys of Abadan to show the current state of urban development and devise plans for expanding the oil company’s social housing and creating “lanes” or new neighbourhoods.¹ This genre of aerial photography, which foregrounded the distinct architectural styles of each neighbourhood and visualized the spatial proximity between the oil refinery, housing projects, ports, and the railway system, became an entry point for me to consider the different surveillance mechanisms used by the oil company beyond photography. As Liliana Gomez describes, the conjunction of visual and racial discourses in corporate photographic archives shows the historical role of photography in reinforcing the biopolitical tools of governance in company towns.²

For example, it became clear to me that the oil towns and oilfields were under BP’s complete surveillance. The choreography of this militarized oil operation was an intricate affair. European and British staff members and anyone under the umbrella category of “British Imperial Subject (B.I.S)” (such as Indian workers) were often assigned to sensitive communication posts. Even the medical staff and resident doctors were part of the company’s political body, collecting information from the local tribes’ activities in Khuzestan and communicating their observations with higher-ranking company officials. Iranians and Arabs were systematically banned from such critical positions. Control of communication infrastructures and information was key to maintaining the flow of oil and suppressing political mobilization, especially pressing considering the increasing growth of union activities and political dissent among local and migrant workers.

Moreover, by paying closer attention to the archival trail of labour strikes in the BP Archives, I realized that they rendered the surveillance of labour production visible, despite the scarcity of visual records from these political movements. Reading through the expansive volume of secret reports by company officials on the worker unions’ political activities revealed an omnipresent militarized gaze following their every movement. This political history of labour strikes serves as a crucial way to access absent images, voices, and stories. Despite the dominance of English in the BP Archive, Farsi was present in secret reports on oil workers’ labour union activities, prison letters written by workers, and collections of Iranian anti-colonial political pamphlets. These archival trails inscribed Farsi as an indicator of surveillance, associating the language with political crackdown, secrecy, and a need for control.¹ Labour strikes, which were seldom visually present in the archive, were nevertheless represented through the sheer volume of reportage and military documents observing the oil workers and activists.² I once came across long lists of oil workers who had participated in strikes, whose names, identification numbers, and professions created faint visual portraits of the workers, even though their photographs were absent.

The panoptic gaze of the archive collides with totalizing images of oil towns under BP’s control, revealing how authority, archives, and visuality have always been inseparable from the physical infrastructures of oil. In his study of visuality, Mirzoeff traces the genealogy of three “complexes of visuality”—plantation slavery, imperialism, and the military-industrial complex—to explore how spatial and visual regimes have historically been cultivated by those in power to safeguard and exercise authority through capital accumulation, biopolitical governance, and cultural hegemony. Mirzoeff’s genealogy is useful to connect visuality—understood as a governing set of representational tools and ways of looking—to how we perceive our present-day global energy complex.¹ The global switch from coal to oil in the mid-twentieth century provided a transition between imperialism and our current military-industrial complex. During this period, different agricultural, industrial, and oil corporations started to proliferate as “company towns.” Kaveh Ehsani has described the broader “social engineering” projects within the company towns of the early twentieth century, which deliberately positioned spaces of labour adjacent to the spaces of leisure to secure control over oil workers, manage segregation, and maximize production efficiency.² The oil towns facilitated and generated spaces that could be classified, spatialized, and aestheticized. The oil towns of Iran, particularly Abadan, where the main refinery and its industrial complex are located, became the primary sites for such engineered spatial control.

Ariella Azoulay has also expanded on photography and film as the dominant visual technologies defining the scopic regimes of modernity. Scopic regimes account for how “practices of seeing, representing, and subject positioning are linked to systems of knowledge and power that shape what can be understood as true.”³ From an archival perspective, scopic regimes also concern the intertwined relationship of aesthetics and politics and the “distribution of the sensible” in the archive.⁴ Azoulay writes “Under an imperial scopic regime, ‘what was there’ is made equal to what made it into the frame.”⁵ Thus, the distribution of presences and absences in BP’s archive was tightly controlled by the diverse visual and textual approaches BP photographers and archivists took to survey and document bodies and spaces that they had disconnected, dispossessed, and displaced from historical connections to the land. During my archival research in the BP archives, I could not help but think of the oil workers’ families, children, and their domestic spaces while filtering through the aerial views of company housing and segregated neighbourhoods in Abadan. Even though the aerial views were engineered to abstract—and perhaps even suppress—the presence of oil workers and their living conditions, I always imagined the domestic spaces in the interstices of the aerial photographs. Azoulay’s assessment of lens-based media points outside of the camera to the political space they help generate, as well as to the institutional practices that safeguard the authority behind photographs.

For instance, take this photograph documenting one of the oilfields of Khuzestan. The photograph is captured from the position of an airplane as its wing directs our attention toward the oil well, pointing at the smoke rising in the distance. Is it a fire that needs to be extinguished? Does the smoke register an event that is being monitored? The camera, the photographer, and the oil well have become one entity, creating two separate visual registers in this frame: the landscape as the background of the action, and the foreground that spatially and visually connects the oil well with the airplane and the cameraperson.

The next photograph in this album also focuses on an oil well’s trail of smoke, but this time from a much closer, non-aerial viewpoint. The photograph is a diptych, presenting a complete scene of action. It is also unclear whether it pictures the same oil well or whether these photographs were even captured on the same day. It focuses on the smoke, as we follow its trail across the two photographic plates, moving right, exiting the first frame, and entering the second. The smoke—a material trace of the oil well—directs our attention to possible danger, even though it is unclear whether this image was captured to observe the fire specifically or to document a regular state of operations. The archival order of these two photographs creates a narrative arc and a sense of authority for the oil company’s camera: its ability to capture the oil well from several angles, locations, and spatial coordinates alludes to its dominance over the landscape. The ubiquitous panoramic gaze of photographs in the BP archive conceals the camera’s—and company’s—disruptions and violence in the landscape by continually framing it as an abstract image.

As I move through colonial photographic archives of oil, I often wonder whether these repositories can be used as legal evidence for demanding economic reparations and ecological justice. What is the difference between seeing the environmental devastation of Iran’s Southern oil fields unfold—as documented by thousands of images and films—and watching the online footage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2011? How does an archival gaze measure a viewer’s proximity to environmental crises? Does the archival representation of an oil well fire that occurred in 1951 near Ahwaz—a fire that lasted for nearly five weeks—register environmental disaster in the same way as Deepwater’s publicly available footage?¹ And what is the threshold of historical liability for a corporation such as BP? We are (unequally) inhabiting the so-called petroleum futures that were once depicted and projected in the BP archives, yet, for me, the catastrophe and social trauma of extraction are inscribed all over their abstracted images of oil. At times, I could not do anything but stare at and linger on these images; the weight of seeing such an ecological tragedy unfold in a contained archival space is hard to capture in words.