Material and Affective Extraction in the Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photographic Project

• In Event: Crude Exposures: Photographing Oil in the "American Century"

Abstract

The most iconic photographs of the Great Depression were produced by photographers working under Roy Stryker for the Farm Security Administration. When Stryker left the FSA, he coordinated an eight-year photographic survey of energy landscapes from the bayous of Louisiana to the industrial corridors of the east coast for Standard Oil (New Jersey). The Standard Oil photographs indexed life on the home front during World War II and became a part of the oil industry’s public relations campaign to illustrate the intimate relationship between oil and everyday life. The Stryker project connects energy production for the war effort to post-war transformations in the domestic sphere. These shifts were both material and ideological, as they relied on substances produced with oil as well as the ideology of abundant and cheap fossil energy that characterized America in the mid-twentieth century.

This paper analyzes a series of photographs from the Stryker project, a 1944 photo story on the Mosley family of Louisiana photographed by Edwin and Louise Rosskam. These photographs document the intersection of oil infrastructure, labor, and domestic life in a developing oil field and were used by Standard Oil to suggest the co-constitutive relationship of oil and familial sentiment. As Louise Rosskam commented, her work with Stryker gave her the opportunity to experience “the feel of America,” and the photographs in the Mosley family photo story offer a “feel of home and landscape” that are bound up with oil. By situating the Rosskam photographs within the tradition of social documentary and New Deal realism, this paper shows that the oil industry has a long history of linking its operations to the intimate spaces of home and affect. The Rosskams’ photographs illustrate the material and affective extraction performed by the oil industry in the 1940s.

Author

• Emily Roehl, The University of Texas at Austin