OIL IMAG(E)INARIES:
CRITICAL REALISM AND THE OIL SANDS
IMRE SZEMAN AND MARIA WHITEMAN
This photo-essay constitutes an initial attempt to map
out the forces and dynamics of capital at work in
Fort McMurray, Alberta—a primary site of global oil
extraction and a space that is now at the heart of the
contemporary Canadian economy; it does so through
the practice of ‘critical realism’ advocated by artist
and critic Allan Sekula. The essay consists of three
parts. In the first part, we describe the characteristics
of Sekula’s critical realism, focusing in particular on
his employment of this aesthetico-political practice in
his book Fish Story (1991), an attempt to challenge
dominant narratives about globalization as immaterial
and unrepresentable by means of a focus on the
transportation of goods by container ships. In the
second part, we explore the challenge of representing
another all-too frequently hidden material dimension
of globalization: our continued dependence on oil
and its by-products. Instead of focusing directly and
literally on the site of oil extraction, the photo-essay we
produce in the third part probes the effects of oil on
life and labour in Fort McMurray. We do so in order
to better understand the city’s specific socio-political
challenges and to grasp the broader implications of oil
for contemporary politics, culture and representation.
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 46
Ce photoreportage constitue une première tentative de
mettre en image le pouvoir et la dynamique du capital à
Fort McMurray, en Alberta, où se trouve le site principal
d’extraction pétrolière qui est au cœur de l’économie
contemporaine canadienne. L’approche que nous
proposons à cette fin est celle du « réalisme critique » mis
de l’avant par l’artiste et critique Allan Sekula. L’article
se divise en deux parties. Premièrement, nous décrivons
les caractéristiques du réalisme critique de Sekula en
mettant l’accent sur son emploi de la pratique éstheticopolitique dans son livre Fish Story (1991); ce dernier
renverse les discours dominants de la globalisation
perçue comme processus immatériel irreprésentable en se
concentrant sur le transport des produits commerciaux
sur les bateaux porte-conteneurs. Deuxièmement, nous
tentons de présenter une autre dimension matérielle
méconnue de la globalisation : notre dépendance vis-àvis du pétrole et de ses sous-produits. Au lieu de mettre le
site d’extraction au premier plan, notre photoreportage
se concentre sur les effets du pétrole sur la vie et sur le
travail à Fort McMurray afin de mieux comprendre les
défis socio-politiques de la ville et les implications au
sens plus large du pétrole sur la politique, la culture et
les représentations contemporaines.
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Fig. 1 Maria Whiteman, HWY 63 N #3
Nothing is indeed quite so perverse or aberrant for the truly postmodern person as
the polemic expression ‘photographic realism’—as though photography, today so
mysterious and contradictory an experience, had anything reassuringly trustworthy or
reliable about it. (Jameson, “Modernism” 53)
In what ways might it be possible to more fully explain
the social and economic dynamics at work in the Alberta
oil sands? This essay constitutes the beginning stages of
an aesthetico-theoretical experiment, undertaken jointly
by an academic and an artist, whose aim is to map the
forces at work in Fort McMurray, Alberta, through the
combined use of text and images. The way in which
we frame our approach is through the employment of
a critical realism that attempts to uncover the forms
and shapes of life in late capitalism in a manner that is
analytically rich and nuanced. We take the term “critical
realism” from the work of photographer and theorist
Allan Sekula, whose photo-series and book Fish Story
remains (to our minds) unduly neglected as an aesthetic
project whose intent is precisely that of navigating the
complexities of global capital and to do so in a manner
that might engender new political possibilities.1
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The thought that any kind of realism—much less a
realism indebted to the necessarily troubled relationship
of photography to the real—might be open to the task
of naming the operations of twenty-first century global
capitalism might, for many critics and scholars, be seen
as misguided and misplaced. After the criticisms of
the Frankfurt School and Bertolt Brecht of the literary
theories of György Lukács, and Fredric Jameson’s
description of the relation of different generic forms
to specific historical periods, the affirmation of an
untroubled political function for realism today seems to
constitute a willful misunderstanding of the operations
and possibilities of genre.2 Sekula’s version of realism
is not one that relies uncritically on the relation of the
photographic image to some easily accessible real that can
be comprehended outside of the discursive and narrative
frames that constitute the social. At the same time, Sekula
resists the all-too easy dismissal of the possibilities of the
photographic image—its almost unprecedented capacity
to provoke conceptual, theoretical and political openings
as a result of its relation to the real. Our visual-textual
experiment proceeds in three parts. First, we offer an
overview of Sekula’s account of critical realism in order
to address some of the potential anxieties that attend the
link of photography with realism, as well as to explore
and explain the manner in which he assembles phototexts that address aspects of operations of global capital
that would otherwise remain hidden or obscured.
Second, we briefly explore the specific difficulties of
capturing our subject matter in photographs, in order
to shape the focus of our critical-visual practice with
respect to the oil sands. Finally, we experiment with a
mapping of a specific, essential aspect of capitalism—its
dependence on oil as dominant energy source—by means
of a critical-realist photo-essay of Northern Alberta oil,
specifically the city of Fort McMurray located at the
heart of Canada’s controversial oil sands development.
In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes:
An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical
political culture which seeks to endow the individual
subject with some new heightened sense of its place
in the global system—will necessarily have to respect
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 48
this now enormously complex representational
dialectic and invent radically new forms in order
to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a
return to some older kind of machinery, some older
and more transparent national space, or some more
traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic
enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all)
will have to hold to the truth of Postmodernism, that
is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space
of multinational capital—at the same time at which it
achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable
new mode of representing this last, in which we may
again begin to grasp our positioning as individual
and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act
and struggle which is at present neutralized by our
spatial as well as our social confusion. (54)
The short critical-realist photo-essay found in the third
part of this essay is by no means an example of that
“unimaginable new mode of representing” that Jameson
names in his famous description of cognitive mapping
(2003). At a minimum, however, we hope to show that
(contra Jameson’s claim in the epigraph) photographic
realism can operate in a mode other than in the direct
one-to-one relation between image and object/event.
This essay is in part about how photos can contribute to
a cognitive mapping of a resource reality about which
we too commonly imagine we already know everything
there is to know.
On Critical Realism: Photography and Capitalism
The exhibit and book that make up Sekula’s Fish Story
are framed in explicit opposition to what had by the
mid-1990s become the dominant way of understanding
globalization—as comprised by the immaterial flows of
media images, economics, politics and ideology across
now anachronistic national borders. Fish Story is an
appropriate title for the project, the third in a series
of projects that explore “the imaginary and material
geographies of the advanced capitalist world” (202).
Sekula’s photographs, the accompanying text, and the
long essay that breaks up the book, explore the central
and continued importance of shipping and the sea in
our attempt to make sense of the present. It does so in
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
order to counteract what Sekula sees as the hyperbolic
‘fish story’ of globalization, as it has been developed
both in academic accounts and in the popular press,
which stresses the easy movement of culture and money
across borders at the expense of the materiality of global
labour and the physical goods moved around the world
via the world’s oceans. Sekula writes:
My argument here runs against the commonly held
view that the computer and telecommunications are
the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In
effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of
maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated
importance attached to that largely metaphysical
construct, “cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of
“instantaneous” contact between distance spaces…
In the imagination, e-mail and airmail come to
bracket the totality of global movement, with the
airplane taking care of everything that is heavy. Thus
the proliferation of air-courier companies and mailorder catalogs serving the professional, domestic,
and leisure needs of the managerial and intellectual
classes does nothing to bring consciousness down to
earth, or to turn it in the direction of the sea, the
forgotten space. (50)
Sekula’s photographic project undertakes the challenge
of presenting a material history of globalization. In
contrast to those attempts to theorize global space that
take as given a description of the world as dominated
primarily by the chaotic flow of disembodied signsystems—whether this is seen as the transnational flow
of money or of culture—in both text and images Sekula
traces out the concrete labour and material networks
that produce and are produced by globalization.
The aim is not to deny the existence and importance
of communication technologies and their effect in
collapsing the globe spatially, nor to contest the fact
that capitalist space is being fundamentally reorganized.
Rather, he wishes both to complicate the picture and
to restore to the study of global capitalism a number
of factors that are in danger of fading away from our
contemporary picture of the globe. For example, the
focus on the harbour, the site where “material goods
appear in bulk” (12), allows Sekula to emphasize the
ways in which the globe resists being turned into a one
big village. He writes:
Large-scale material flows remain intractable.
Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of
large-capacity hulls and the power output of the
diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships
not far beyond that of the first quarter of this century.
It still takes about eight days to cross the Atlantic
and about twelve to cross the Pacific. A society of
accelerated flows is also in certain key aspects a
society of deliberately slow movement. (50)
Sekula’s emphasis on the materiality of globalization
might seem to be merely the result of a photographic
imperative or limit: the need to focus on and capture
visible signs. And of course, one of the problems that
the global present has posed for contemporary art,
especially art that is politically committed, is that the
reality of the world system is something that seems
altogether impossible to represent. The complicated
web or network of technological and social systems that
make-up contemporary global finance or mass media,
for example, defies the ability of our contemporary
aesthetic forms (all of which had their genesis prior
to the twentieth century) to render them in some way
comprehensible, due both to their scale and their
invisibility—powerful electronic phantoms (in the case
of financial and media transactions) whose presence
everywhere and at all times makes them no easier to
frame in snap shot of any given place, event or thing.
So what does Sekula propose to do that is different, that
makes comprehensible what seems incomprehensible?
As Benjamin Buchloh points out, the avant-garde in
photography has since the 1950s become identified
primarily with modernist experimental forms such as
photomontage, while documentary photography, with its
insistence on capturing the ‘real,’ has been marginalized
as an artistic practice. This is because the relationship
of the photograph to reality has been viewed with
increasing suspicion over time, especially in terms of
the political potential of photography. Once seen as the
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unique characteristic of photography, it is now common
to view the ‘Real’ of the photograph as that which most
obscures or interrupts the procedures by which ‘reality’
in the photograph is managed and constructed (thus
its ‘perversity’ or ‘aberrance’ for the truly postmodern
person).
So while critical photographic practices
have turned away from the use of photography to
document reality, for Sekula it is in fact the photograph’s
unavoidable “social referentially, its way of describing—
albeit in enigmatic, misleading, reductive and superficial
terms—a world of social institutions, gestures, manners,
relationships” (Sekula, Photographs ix) that makes it a
necessary tool in the attempt to understand the present.3
In opposition to both the interdiction on representing
the real in the aesthetic practices of the Left within which
Sekula positions himself, as well as the various critical
and artistic suspicions about documentary photography,
his photographic practice insists on the importance of
addressing reality. This is a form of realism that does
not settle for the quotidian surfaces and experiences
that are usually imagined (especially in relation to the
photographic images) as reality, but a realism whose
aim is to document what is hidden in that phenomenal
everydayness and its ready-to-hand socio-political codes
and narrative conventions that are all-too easily passed
off as reality. In Fish Story, this is the world of industrial
labour and the concrete movement of goods that are
hidden or obscured by most discourses concerning
globalization, whose representation thus gives us a
different vision of the global than that produced in
either its victorious or resistant modalities.
It is important to emphasize that the realism of Sekula’s
photographs is not a naïve realism that insists that
the structure of the contemporary world is visible
and accessible to simple photographic representation.
Instead, Sekula’s aim has been to create a “critical
realism.” Sekula characterizes this as
a realism not of social facts but of everyday experience
in and against the grip of advanced capitalism. This
realism sought to brush traditional realism against
the grain. Against the photo-essayistic promise of
‘life’ caught by the camera, I sought to work within a
world already replete with signs. (x)
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 50
It is an essential aspect of Sekula’s ‘critical realism’ that
the photographs must both insist on their relationship
with reality while simultaneously drawing attention
to the fact that they are partial and constructed,
without either position canceling the other one out;
the reality in the photographs is further not merely
indexical—an accumulation of details about the
external world—but reveals and critiques the system
of social, political, and economic relationship under
capitalism. This dialectic between what Buchloh calls
“a conception of photography as contextual (i.e., as
a discursively and institutionally determined fiction)
and a conception of photography as referential (i.e., as
an actual record of complex material conditions)” is
maintained by Sekula through three procedures (195).
First, Sekula’s photographs are not random snapshots,
but are arranged in a narrative sequence. The indexical
function of individual photographs is problematized by
their inclusion in a narrative that has necessarily been
created rather than offered up by reality. Second, since
the photographs exhibit a wide range of techniques,
photographic conventions and aesthetic choices, the
different ways of producing the real are highlighted
formally. Finally, as Buchloh notes, “the sudden focus
on a seemingly irrelevant and banal detail interrupts
the overall narrative in the manner of a Brechtian
intervention that reminds the viewers/readers of the
constructed nature of the representation with which
they are confronted” (196).
In assessing the operations of critical realism, it is
important to actually look at Sekula’s photographs
themselves, however briefly, in order to assess its
possibilities and limits as a way of analyzing the space of
global culture. Fish Story is comprised of seven narrative
sequences of photographs interspersed with short pieces
of text that add additional information to the reading
of the narrative, either in the form of anecdotes or
historical or social information. The book also includes
an essay in two parts entitled “Dismal Science” (41-55;
105-38) that traces with great complexity the historical
shift in representations of the sea, from the maritime
panoramas of seventeenth-century Dutch painting to the
development of containerized shipping in the 1950s and
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
1960s, and from an ocean sublime in its sheer breadth
and scale to one entirely rationalized by the logic of
containment: the container hides its cargo, transforming
its concrete contents into abstract units that, stacked up,
even resemble money. To capture the full complexity
of Sekula’s project, the multiple narratives that exist
within Fish Story—the seven photographic narratives
themselves, the accompany text, and the essay—must
themselves be read as a larger, heterogeneous and
ambiguous narrative about globalization that remains
indeterminate, even though Sekula adheres to a vision
of globalization that emphasizes the importance of the
economic within it.
We will limit ourselves here to a consideration of two
of Sekula’s photographic narratives in Fish Story. The
photographs in the very first section of the book are of
the harbours of California—the forgotten harbours of
L.A., Long Beach and San Diego, which nevertheless
are amongst the busiest in the United States. Sekula
begins his study of harbours and of the sea at home,
before traveling outward to other ports—Gdansk,
Rotterdam, Ulsan in South Korea, Vigo in Spain, and
Veracruz, Mexico. As the text that begins this first
narrative sequence reveals, however, with respect to the
sea, home has become a problematic concept. There are,
strictly speaking, no American shipping vessels: ships
travel under flags of convenience that have made the
Bahamas and the Marshall Islands into world shipping
powers, while simultaneously transforming the concept
of the nation into little more than a commodity to be
bought and sold. Nevertheless, at the ‘local’ site of
the Los Angeles harbour, where materially the United
States encounters the East that lies to the West of it, a
whole host of relations becomes apparent through the
sequence of individual photographs that Sekula takes:
the end of the ship-building industry in the United States
and its continuation; the transformation of harbour into
a space of “bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past”
(12); the ecological catastrophes visited on the globe as
a result of the demands of a fuel-hungry economy; the
appropriation of the sea as an architectural motif in the
design of the conference room of an advertising agency;
the decidedly less romanticized, rationalized world of a
contemporary container facility that has rendered the
sea into a giant factory; a sign of race, as World War
II-era housing for shipyard workers is moved from its
now desirable location next to the sea to by re-used
in South-Central Los Angeles; the co-existence of low
technology with high technology; the militarization
of the sea; and the effects of technological ‘progress’
on individual lives. This sequence of photographs,
outlining the multiple modalities of shipping and the
work of harbours, is followed by text that recounts an
odd moment in geo-political history: “Weapons for the
Iraqis in the forward hold. Weapons for the Iranians in
the aft hold. For a moment the global supply network is
comically localized, as pictorially condensed as a good
political cartoon” (32).
The second photographic narrative concerns Ulsan,
the factory town built by Hyundai in order to serve
the largest shipyard in the world. Here, we see a
contemporary version of Utopia coming to completion
(the ship Hyundai Utopia in a shipyard), followed by
the myths of its primordial origin (a picture of the
ironclad turtle-ship used in defeat of Japan in 1592 in
the Hyundai headquarters); the laboring body, displaced
from the fishing village that once occupied the site of
the shipyards and from the former site of industrial
labour in the West, set against the profits extracted
from it (a photo of an executive golf course on the edge
of the shipyard); a billboard announcing plans for an
amusement park set against an image of the fishing
village that it will displace. Against these images of
Ulsan, it is important to weigh Sekula’s anecdote about
the “The Korean’s Workers’ Museum” established by an
American crew on one of the first ships built by Daewoo,
another of Korea’s shipbuilding giants:
When an American crew picked up the first of these
ships from the Daewoo dockyard, completed the
sea trials, and began the voyage across the Pacific,
they discovered in the nooks and crannies of the
new ship a curious inventory of discarded tools used
in the building of the vessel: crude hammers made
by welding a heavy bold onto the end of a length
of pipe, wrenches cut roughly from scraps of deck
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plate. Awed by evidence of an improvisatory iron-age
approach to ship building, which correspond to their
earlier impressions of the often-lethal brutality of
Korean industrial methods, they gathered the tools
into a small display in the crew’s lounge, christening
it “The Korean Worker’ Museum.”
American elites have cultivated a fantastic fear of
superior Asian intelligence; in doing so they obscure
their own continued cleverness. (74)
It is perhaps hard to get a sense of Sekula’s entire project
from these brief descriptions of his photos and a summary
of small portions of his text. Nevertheless, it allows us to
suggest what we see in this effort to map global space and
to do it in a ‘concrete’ or material way rather than from
a large-scale assumption that culture is deterritorialized
in the way imagined by some critics and transnational
corporations, and to engage in this mapping through
photography—a medium whose ability to relate to the
concrete has been rendered increasingly suspect in critical
thought. Sekula’s photographs and text together produce
a vision of the global present that is just as complex as
one that a critic such as Arjun Appadurai wishes to
produce via his vocabulary of ‘scapes’ (to point to but
one prominent example of a new discourse whose intent
is to better grasp the complexities and contradictions
of contemporary global reality). It is shot through with
all of the numerous contradictions and paradoxes that
globalization introduces: the displacement of labour; the
wholesale transformation of societies; the complexities
of race and identity; the growing abstraction of even
the most apparently concrete processes; the existence of
new localities, both those generated by capital and in
resistance to it; the rationalization of production; and
the continued existence of labour and the labouring
body in a world that when viewed through the Western
media sometimes seems to have commodity traders and
economic forecasters as its only possible professions. It
addresses these various levels in multiple ways: through
direct documentation, through the juxtaposition of
images with text, anecdotes with defamiliarizing photonarrative sequences, serious academic writing with offhanded comments, important images with apparently
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 52
minor and trivial ones. By focusing on sea-trade as the
axis along which to examine global phenomena, Sekula
also manages to get beyond the nation into the ‘space’
of globalization, a space marked by the criss-crossing of
ships not only from West to East, center and periphery,
but within the periphery itself (Hong Kong to Tapei,
Taipei to Shenzhen, Shenzhen to Beijing, and so on),
thereby disorganizing this binary in a way that insists
on a new conception of space. Nevertheless, Sekula’s
critical realism maps this space with new insights and a
density of experience that is often missing from accounts
of the framing forces and energies of globalization. The
insistence of his photographs on recording the reality
of specific sites, and furthermore, the multiplicity of
signs in this reality, accomplishes three things. First,
by focusing on labour, it draws into question a narrow
academicism that has rendered globalization into a
name for the global dispersal of cultural commodities.
Second, by insisting on the visibility of globalization,
Sekula’s critical realism challenges us to avoid turning
the circuits and spaces of globalization into something
that, like Kant’s sublime, is ‘too big for representation.’
Finally, by mapping the everyday spaces of labour
that are all too often hidden from view, it encourages
a renewed ethnographic attention to globalization, the
reading of signs in and from reality, rather than as they
have been transformed and rendered symptomatic in
those global cultural commodities that cultural critics
love to decode.
We do not mean to suggest that Sekula’s attempt to
reinvigorate the genre of realism is without its own
problems (which would need to be investigated in more
depth). Nevertheless, it is clear to us that Sekula’s mode
of critical realism opens up a way of thinking about
the politics of globalization and of the globalization
of culture that permits us to remain both open to
and yet critical of the potentialities occasioned by the
contemporary reorganization of space. Sekula’s criticalaesthetic practice is a model of how it might be possible
to think space—and so, too, culture and economics—
differently, and one that avoids becoming, as much
contemporary criticism all too quickly and all too
frequently does, “indistinguishable from an ideological
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Fig. 2 Maria Whiteman, Dune
legitimation of the social forms that are the creation of
global capitalism” (Dirlik, “Global” 36).
More than a strict model that should be taken as the
framework for all future politically motivated aesthetic
investigation, Sekula’s critical realism highlights a
means and method by which to name the materiality
of a global system whose generative force all too often
seems to have evaporated into the immateriality of
communication systems and the effects of a hi-tech
revolution. Against those who are anxious at the very
thought of a ‘capitalist realism’—anxious because
the conjunction of the terms immediately suggests a
theoretical limit, a too quick arrival at a solution, or
a misunderstanding of realism as an easily-adopted
interpretative pragmatism instead of a historical genre
burdened by hermeneutic preconceptions—the analysis
that we hope to provide here by means of a photo-essay
of a key site of globalization in Canada is intended
to challenge the comforts of incapacity that all too
often attends the identification of global capital as an
unrepresentable system.4
Oil in the Streets?
Such is the promise of critical photographic realism. To
what effect might it be used in trying to name another
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Fig. 3 Imre Szeman, Pumpjack
largely hidden dynamic of globalization: the system of
oil extraction and production that is the lifeblood of
capitalism—so essential to it that capitalism could not
even exist in its absence? It is telling that even in the age
of Apple and Google, any list of the largest companies
on the planet is crowded with firms who generate the
ultimate substance on which the planet’s economy runs:
oil.
It might seem questionable to start from the assumption
that the realities of oil are hidden from view. But
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 54
consider: even in the streets of Edmonton, a city whose
economy has continued to grow as a result of the
role it plays in servicing and supporting Canada’s oil
sands, there are fewer directly visible signs of oil than
one might imagine. On the eastern edge of the city, a
large stand of refineries and oil tanks sit just off the
Anthony Henday freeway. Lit up like Christmas trees
and smoldering away in the crystalline winter air of
Edmonton, refinery row can be seen from almost any
building in the city over a few stories high. But it is easy
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
enough to resolve the aesthetic/environmental/economic
problem these industrial objects pose: turn your eyes to
the west or simply stay low to the ground. What does one
then see? To the west: a sky animated by the beautiful
sunsets that grace northern skies; low to the ground:
banal commercial and residential streets, but also the
deep, wooded valley of the North Saskatchewan River,
as striking and attractive as any urban park anywhere
in the world. There are many smaller signs marking the
significance of oil to the making and shaping of this part
of the world—a billboard advertising a strip club with
the tag-line “We Support Big Oil!”, a life-sized bronze
statue of rig workers in the middle of West Edmonton
Mall, a multi-coloured pumpjack in the parking lot of
a suburban McDonald’s—but none linger long in one’s
imagination. Instead of demanding an account of the
what and the why of Canada’s most northerly major
city, they appear as the sort of curiosities one might
expect to come across in the wild, wild West, and can
be as quickly and easily written out of one’s view as the
much larger and more intimidating industrial structures
from whence the lifeblood of petrosocieties flows.
One could object: is not the very existence of Edmonton
a visible sign of oil culture? Are not its skyscrapers and
that of its sister-city, Calgary, nothing if not oil rendered
visible? Indeed, is not the whole of global modernity
itself nothing but liquid oil transformed into the
capacity for movement and solidified into objecthood?
The problem of rendering the reality of oil visible in the
form of a photo-essay like the one that Sekula produces
in Fish Story is two-fold: either oil is so contained within
the quotidian landscape of modernity that it does not
present itself to view, or it is so omnipresent, equivalent
to global capitalist modernity itself, that it is hidden in
plain sight. Given this either/or, all or nothing, how is
one to proceed?
To try to map oil imaginaries via images of oil produces
an interpretive hermeneutic that is full of problems. The
limit introduced by the search for small visual clues—a
billboard, public statuary, a faux pumpjack—is that one
already knows the answer to the problem. The statistics
tell us that Edmonton is a city whose economy is highly
dependent on oil and so one goes looking for examples
of oil iconography in its streets—and finds the results
disappointing. The disappointment is two-fold: the
(relative) absence of the kind of visible signs that one
hoped to find; the lack of an appropriate index of a
practice whose import suggests that one should find signs
of it here, there and everywhere. This is a disappointment
founded on a series of flawed interpretive presumptions,
which nevertheless force us to confront the question of
how to interrogate an oil imaginary in the absence of
perceptible images of oil—the equivalent to the space of
Sekula’s harbours and the traffic between them.
As with Sekula’s interrogation of Ulsan, we have chosen
to engage with oil by looking at the way in which a local,
supposedly peripheral space is mapped into the circuits
of globalization. Situated in the northeastern corner of
the province, and linked by a single, treacherous highway
to other ports of call, Fort McMurray, Alberta, is far
from the dominant population centres of Canada. At
the same, it lies at the heart of the country’s twenty-first
century economy. In an age that is thought to be defined
by the operations of service economy and cognitive
capitalism—a high tech age in which immaterial
capitalism trumps the material variety—40% of the
value of Canadian exports consists of the commodity
extracted from the oil sands that surround the region
(Cooper). The financial canyons of Toronto are filled
with cash the origins of which can be traced back to a
northern community struggling with the challenges of
isolation and ferocious growth, which together produce
social and economic difficulties of a kind experienced
nowhere else in the country, and, indeed, in few other
places on earth.
The most familiar images from Fort McMurray are of
the oil sands themselves. These images are inevitably
aerial shots whose intent is to emphasize the sheer size
and scale of those sites at which bitumen is extracted—a
vast and destructive mining operation that requires
surface vegetation to be shoved aside, and which leaves
behind massive tailings ‘ponds’ and mountains of sulfur.
With the exception of small vehicles that appear to be
more like toy trucks than the genuine monstrosities they
55 • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • IMAGINATIONS
OIL IMAG(E)INARIES
Fig. 4 Maria Whiteman, Power Systems
in fact are (the largest ground vehicles on the planet are
put to work in the oil sands), there is seldom evidence
of human bodies in action in the mine sites. To frame
the scale of these sites in a single image is to say all that
one needs to say about them: such images constitute
not only a specific indictment of the oil sands, but form
an allegory that condenses the brutal environmental
consequences of capitalist modernity into a single image.
Or such seems to be the presumption, based on visual
representations of the oil sands to date.
We will leave aside the question of whether or not
this scalar approach is ultimately successful, either
aesthetically or politically.5 What we want to draw
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 56
attention to is what is left out of such oil images: labour,
forms of life, the experience of bodies working and
living in proximity to the oil sands—in other words,
all those varied registers of experience on which Sekula
draws on to produce his critical photo-narratives of
the shipping trade and its role in late capitalism. In a
world replete with signs, images of the oil sands have
limited themselves to the visualization of extraction
sites; in doing so, they provide almost no account of
the full complexity of the space and time called ‘Fort
McMurray.’
Let us be clear: by turning our attention away from
mining sites, we intend no apologia for oil extraction
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Fig. 5 Maria Whiteman, Gathering Storm
and its environmental consequences. On the contrary:
we think it is only by more fully naming and explaining
the dynamics of life and labour in relation to the sands
that we can begin to figure the significance of a place that
oil imaginaries in Canadian urban centres are so quick
to render peripheral, assigning to it an environmental
culpability which they somehow do not share. Paying
attention to the signs of labour and globalization in Fort
McMurray, to the organization of life and work at a
central site of resource extraction on the planet, offers
us a beginning point for a more complex and nuanced
narrative of oil economies and their role in global
capitalism.
Recovery: Life, Labour, Oil—A Photo-Essay
There is an incredible infrastructure needed to manage
and enable work in the oil fields. In addition to the
primary sites of oil extraction, workers are required to
fill out a huge secondary economy made up of all manner
service industries—from fast food and gas stations to
firms specializing in the complex equipment required
for oil exploration. With few notable exceptions, the oil
extraction sites up north are hidden from view, accessible
only via gated and guarded dirt roads. Much more
visible—indeed, inescapable to vision—are the oil service
companies, their vehicles, machinery, and the physical
detritus that comes with infrastructure work. These
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Fig. 6 Maria Whiteman, HWY 63 N #1
companies occupy hastily constructed light industrial
buildings on either side of the city; the strip malls that
stretch between them contain bars, liquor stores, and
those few companies in the city that can manage the high
rents and uncertain economics of the place.
The workers who spend their days in these parts of Fort
McMurray are perhaps the most heavily impacted by the
high cost of living in the region. Well-paid, but not nearly
as well compensated as the oil workers whose high
salaries inflate the cost of housing, they must scramble
to find a decent place to live. The lack of affordable
housing (indeed the dearth of housing in any form) is
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 58
due in part to the limited land made available for the
development of private accommodation. The majority
of the land surrounding the city is owned by the Crown,
which has been slow in releasing it to the Municipality of
Wood Buffalo—too slow to absorb the rapid expansion
of population.6 As for the size of the population: a
huge gap exists between municipal censuses and the
ones conducted by the federal government, largely
because the latter finds it hard to count the number of
people living in unusual, quasi-legal dwellings across
the region. The result: too few services for too many
people, without even taking into consideration the large
numbers of workers who spend chunks of time in Ft.
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Fig. 7 Maria Whiteman, HWY 63 N #2
Mac, flying in to work and out for breaks, who make
demands on municipal services and extend the line-ups
of the country’s busiest Tim Hortons (Pratt).
New condo towers are being constructed in the city core,
but for now, they remain sketches whose details have yet
to be filled in. In other places, land is left unused by
developers intent on driving up prices by producing and
managing property scarcity. And so, on the outskirts of
town, clumps of young men live in trailer homes, their
new trucks squeezed together in the narrow driveways
of their homes-away-from-home. It is hard to commit to
a place where one must live in such conditions, which
is no doubt why the city tends to feel ephemeral and
impermanent, despite the ferocious activity in its streets.
The streets can be full of traffic. As with so much else
(water and sewage systems, social services, etc.), there are
more people living in the region than the architecture of
the streets was designed to handle. At the beginning and
the end of each workday, Highway 63 is jammed with
traffic—a shock to a visitor or newcomer, who might
expect the energies of commerce to run at a slower
speed this far north. The city is in the midst of a massive
expansion of road infrastructure. The bridge across
the Athabasca River, which can already handle more
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OIL IMAG(E)INARIES
Fig. 8 Maria Whiteman, Transit
than three times the load of normal bridges in order to
manage massive construction and transportation loads,
is being widened and will eventually host ten lanes of
traffic. Enormous new intersections, whose scale seems
out of proportion with the size of the community it
services, are being crafted to move traffic in and out of
the huge suburbs nested in the boreal forest above the
noise and chaos of the river valley.
Adding to the traffic: a fleet of mud-caked buses, which
move workers from home to field, from field to airport,
and from airport to work camp. On its 400 coaches
and 300 site vehicles, the company Diversified records
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 60
5 million passenger trips a year. Even in a city whose
economy depends on a substance linked to private car
travel, mass transportation is a necessity. Much of the
workforce arrives via plane to start their shifts at farflung mining and in situ sites. Without access to private
cars, they are ferried by bus up and down 63, before
snaking out on dirt and gravel roads whose sign posts
bear the names not of nearby towns, but of extraction
sites of specific companies: Suncor, CNRL, Shell.
In front of PTI’s Athabasca and Wapasu Creek campsite
60 km north of the Ft. Mac, drivers pick up and
unload workers in a scene reminiscent of a large city’s
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Fig. 9 Maria Whiteman, Camp #1
central bus stop. Wearied workers stomp into the main
entrance, grabbing a snack or coffee from the on-site
Timmy’s, before trudging off to their rooms. In the
lobby, one can imagine that one is at one of the nicer
chain hotels located off a highway ramp close to a big
city. From the outside, however, the camp is lifeless, and
resembles nothing if not a detention facility or prison. It
comes as no surprise to learn that PTI built the military
camps used by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. The
same disciplined, controlled, institutional logic pervades
these buildings, up to the fact that many such camps
are dry: no alcohol is allowed. In the rooms, workers
are provided with Internet and satellite TV. Outside,
the poorly constructed basketball court looks as if it
has rarely been used; so, too, the golf driving range,
which is dusty and empty of life. Camp life is time to be
endured until the next spell away from work and back
in civilization.
Recovery: what the body gets when it is away from
Ft. Mac, but also the promise that everything will be
replaced after industry has extracted what it needs.
Whether recovery is in fact possible is hard to gauge
from the few existing examples. A tour of the Suncor site
ends with a trip through Wapisiw Lookout, a tailings
pond that has been turned into a grassland dotted with
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Fig. 10 Maria Whiteman, Camp #2
clumps of rock for animal habitation and monitoring
stations to measure the health of the soil under the grass.
A video shown on the tour bus makes it clear that a
great deal of science and effort was put into the task
of reclaiming the site; to the eye, it looks unimpressive,
incomplete, especially with the dunes of the Suncor site
just behind it all too visible, regardless of which way one
turns. A sign on the edge of the grassland reads: “Do
Not Enter.”
At the junction where Highway 63 loops back upon itself,
one finds an earlier patch of reclaimed land: Syncrude’s
Gateway Hill. Across it run the Matcheetawin (the
Cree word for “beginning place”) Trails, at the head of
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 62
which sits an installation representing the Cree circle of
life. We walk the length of the trail and encounter no
one. Indeed, the trail seems disused and forgotten: it is
overgrown and many of the interpretive markers that
identify reclamation dates and names of trees stuck back
in are in danger of disappearing into the underbrush.
Gateway Hill is experienced more as an object lesson of
corporate responsibility whose message grows old fast,
than as a space where one can spend time in nature. An
industry pamphlet picked up at the Oil Sands Discovery
Centre (printed on recycled paper) reads: “Canada’s oil
sands industry is committed to reducing its footprint,
reclaiming all land affected by operations and
maintaining biodiversity” (CAPP n.p.). Even if one were
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Fig. 11 Maria Whiteman, Work Adult Mature
not to doubt the commitment, the existing evidence of
the recovery suggests that the industrial use of the land
will leave permanent scars, both on nature and on those
who will live alongside these spaces.
At the Suncor Community Leisure Centre, people lift
weights, make use of the jogging track, enjoy the pool
and read in the community library. On the day we
visit, the indoor soccer courts are taken up with events
connected to the 32nd Annual Alberta Surface Mine
Rescue Competition. This is the only sign that we are
someplace strange—the only burst to the surface of
consciousness of an economy that elsewhere is able to
all too easily hide in the nooks and crannies of daily life
and habit.
It is tempting to see Fort McMurray as exceptional. But
even a brief encounter with this place makes it clear that
it should be seen as an index of the rule of life and labour
in the 21st century. As long as we treat it as an exception,
we avoid reading in its configurations the signs of our
own crises, conveniently shedding our culpability in the
environmental and social circumstances generated by
the oil sands. Is it not the case that, in effect, we all live
next to sites of oil extraction, even if it is all too easy for
many of us to offshore this recognition to remote sites,
whether at home or abroad? Do we not all participate
in an oil economy? Are we not all agents of a capitalism
run amuck, which has so diminished social life that we
live in our homes as if in a work camp—waiting for the
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OIL IMAG(E)INARIES
Fig. 12 Maria Whiteman, First Aid
moment to come when we finally are off work for good
and don’t have to spend our days in thrall to the private
solitude of satellite TV?
By using photographs to open up an investigation of
the material realities of globalization, Sekula’s practice
of critical realism has offered a counterpoint to those
discourses that too quickly narrate the global present
through the ephemerality of telecommunications
systems and the near instantaneity of the movement
of ideas, money, and even bodies. Sekula’s Fish Story
emphasizes the sites where multiple forms of exchange
take place—the harbours and docks—as well as the
slowness of physical movement in a world whose
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 64
contemporary substance is most often given form
through narratives of speed. We believe that engaging
in a critical realist photo practice in relation to oil
produces similar insights into both the narratives that
surround it and the role this substance plays in giving
shape to global reality. Oil is an omnipresent feature
of the world we inhabit—the life-giving substance of
the physical and imaginary infrastructures we have
shaped over the past century-and-a-half. Even so, there
is a tendency to ignore or to underplay its significance,
seeing it instead as an important but not irreplaceable
substance, as one form of energy which can eventually
be substituted for others without necessitating major
changes in social life. Our focus on Fort McMurray is
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
meant to give shape, depth and complexity to a place
that has become little more than a normative by-word
for all that is wrong with the world. As with Sekula’s
visual-textual interrogations, critical realism of the oil
sands also generates more general reflections on the
narrative forms through which globalization is named
and explained, and draws attention to the real bodies
and the living labour that continues to be put to use to
generate profit regardless of the consequences.
Image Notes
Fig. 1 Maria Whiteman, HWY 63 N #3
Fig. 2 Maria Whiteman, Dune (2012)
Fig. 3 Imre Szeman, Pumpjack (2012)
Fig. 4 Maria Whiteman, Power Systems (2012)
Fig. 5 Maria Whiteman, Gathering Storm (2012)
Fig. 6 Maria Whiteman, HWY 63 N #1 (2012)
Ernst Bloch et. al. Aesthetics and Politics: They Key Texts
of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism. New
York: Verso, 1977. Print.
Buchloh, Benjamin. “Allan Sekula: Photography
Between Discourse and Document” in Allan Sekula,
Fish Story. Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1991. 189200. Print.
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).
Upstream Dialogue: The Facts on: Oil Sands. April
2012. Print.
Cooper, Dave. “West Coast pipeline key to Canada’s
interests, economist says.” Edmonton Journal. 10
May 2012: C1. Print.
Dirlik, Arif. “The Global in the Local.” Global/
Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational
Imaginary. Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake.
New York: Columbia UP, 1994: 21-45. Print.
Fig. 8 Maria Whiteman, Transit (2012)
Fredric Jameson, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying
the Ideology of Modernism.” The Bulletin of the
Midwest Modern Language Association 8.1 (1975):
1-20. Print.
Fig. 9 Maria Whiteman, Camp #1 (2012)
--.
Fig. 7 Maria Whiteman, HWY 63 N #2 (2012)
Fig. 10 Maria Whiteman, Camp #2 (2012)
Fig. 11 Maria Whiteman, Work Adult Mature (2012)
Fig. 12 Maria Whiteman, First Aid (2012)
“Modernism and Imperialism.” Nationalism,
Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota Press, 1990. 43-66. Print.
--. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1991. Print.
Works Cited
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking
Environmental Aesthetics. US: Presidents and
Fellows of Harvard College. 2007. Print.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: U of
Minnesota P, 1996. Print.
Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. “Cost of
Living.” Web.
Baetens, Jan and Hilde Van Gelder, eds. Critical Realism
in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s
Photography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2010. Print.
Pratt, Sheila. “Federal Census Missed Thousands of
Residents, Fort McMurray’s Mayor Says.” Edmonton
Journal. Feb. 8, 2012. Web. Aug. 6, 2012.
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Sekula, Alan. Fish Story. Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag,
1991. Print.
---. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and
Photoworks 1973-1983. Ed. Benjamin Buchloh.
Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, 1984. Print.
Szeman, Imre. “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil
Documentaries.” Journal of American Studies 46.2
(2012): 423-439. Print.
Szeman, Imre and Maria Whiteman. “The Big Picture:
On the Politics of Contemporary Photography.”
Third Text 23.5 (2009): 551-556. Print.
(Endnotes)
1. The one sustained confrontation with Sekula’s
critical realism can be found in, a collection of papers
from a symposium held at the Lieven Gevaert Research
Centre for Photography and Visual Studies (Belgium) in
September 2005.
2. See the essays in Bloch et. al. and Fredric Jameson’s
essay “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of
Modernism.”
3. Other art photographers identified with realism use it
to different effect through the size of the photos in their
exhibitions and the scale their images represent. For a
discussion of this form of realism, see Imre Szeman and
Maria Whiteman, “The Big Picture: On the Politics of
Contemporary Photography.”
4. Against the comforts of capacity, we follow Timothy
Morton’s response to the habit of the “beautiful soul” to
remain in cynicism. He writes:
Our choice is false if it has been reduced to
one between hypocrisy and cynicism, between
wholeheartedly getting into environmental rhetoric
and cynically distancing ourselves from it. In both
cases, we would be writing liturgies for the beautiful
soul. Although it is ‘realistic’ to be cynical rather
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • 66
than hypocritical, we do not wish to reinforce the
current state of affairs. Our answer to the ruthless
ransacking of nature, and of the idea of nature, must
be yes, we admit to the reality of the situation. And
no, we refuse to submit to it. (140)
5. For an extended discussion of the politics of scale in
environmental film, see Imre Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics:
The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” especially 432-439.
6. “The main service area of Fort McMurray is
surrounded by Crown land and therefore, there is limited
land available for development where most people live”
(Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo).
SZEMAN AND WHITEMAN
Szeman Imre: Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair
in Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film
Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author, coauthor or co-editor of ten books to date; four additional
books are under contract and will appear in print by
2014. As author or co-author, he has written Zones
of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the
Nation (2003), Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (2003,
2nd ed. 2009, 3rd ed. 2013, co-written with Susie O’Brien),
and After Globalization (2011, co-written with Eric
Cazdyn). His editorial projects include Pierre Bourdieu:
Fieldwork in Culture (2000), The Johns Hopkins Guide
to Literary Theory and Criticism (2004), Canadian
Cultural Studies: A Reader (2009), Global-Local
Consumption (2010), Cultural Autonomy: Frictions
and Connections (2010), Cultural Theory: An
Anthology (Blackwell, 2010), and most recently,
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns
Hopkins Guide (2012).
Szeman, Imre : Imre Szeman est titulaire d’une chaire de
recherche du Canada en études culturelles, et est professeur
d’anglais et d’études cinématographiques à l’Université
de l’Alberta. Il est auteur, co-auteur et coéditeur d’une
dizaine de livres à ce jour –quatre autres livres étant
sous contrat et devant paraître d’ici 2014. Parmi ses
œuvres, on trouve : Zones of Instability: Literature,
Postcolonialism and the Nation (2003), Popular Culture:
A User’s Guide (2003, 2ème ed. 2009, 3ème ed. 2013, coauteure : Susie O’Brien), et After Globalization (2011,
co-auteur : Eric Cazdyn). Parmi ses travaux éditoriaux,
on trouve : Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture
(2000), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
and Criticism (2004), Canadian Cultural Studies: A
Reader (2009), Global-Local Consumption (2010),
Cultural Autonomy: Frictions and Connections (2010),
Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2010), ainsi
que Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The
Johns Hopkins Guide (2012).
Whiteman, Maria: Maria Whiteman is Assistant
Professor of Drawing and Intermedia in Fine Arts at
the University of Alberta. She teaches courses in mixed
media, photography, video, drawing and installation
art. Her current art practice explores themes such as art
and science, relationships between industry, community
and nature, and the place of animals in our cultural and
social imaginary. In addition to her studio work, she
conducts research in contemporary art theory and visual
culture. She is currently working on The Retreat (coeditor; to be published by Autonomedia) and Refiguring
the Animal: Plasticity and Contemporary Art (co-edited
with Amanda Boetzkes; to be published by University
of Minnesota Press). In 2011, Whiteman had a solo
exhibition at Latitude 53 and she will be included in
the 2013 Alberta Biennial at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Whiteman is a co-director of the 2012 Banff Research in
Culture/documenta 13 research residency.
Whiteman, Maria : Maria Whiteman est professeure
adjointe de dessin et de recherches intermédiatiques dans
la branche des Beaux-Arts à l’Université de l’Alberta.
Elle enseigne des cours sur les médias mixtes, la
photographie, la vidéo, le dessin, et l’art de l’installation.
Son projet artistique actuel consiste en l’examen de
thèmes comme l’art et les sciences, les rapports entre
l’industrie, la communauté et la nature, et l’importance
des animaux dans les imaginaires culturel et social. En
plus de son travail en studio, elle mène des recherches
théoriques en art contemporain et en culture visuelle.
Elle est coéditeure de The Retreat (Autonomedia, à
paraître) et de Refiguring the Animal: Plasticity and
Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, à
paraître; coéditeure : Amanda Boetzkes).
Copyright Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman. This
article is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0
License although certain works referenced herein may
be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their
right to fair dealing under the Canadian Copyright Act.
67 • ISSUE 3-2, 2012 • IMAGINATIONS