Frackturing Time and Space:
Re-Constructing the Landscape of an Economic Boom
When considering the landscape, through imagery or otherwise, the dialectic of nature and culture is always close at hand. Whether through the lens of J. B. Jackson’s vernacular, where he states that no landscape can be understood without acknowledging and understanding the culture that interacts with it, or Mercea Eliade’s notion that a landscape is a stage in which humans influence nature by speeding it up or slowing it down, a temporal relationship. I would add another role humanity plays in the interaction with the landscape and that is one of collection and dispersion, one of spaciality.
In this series I have imposed the vertical format on a traditionally horizontal subject. By deemphasizing the horizon line, a central element and perspective device in the Western rational treatment of space (and perhaps closely related to the notion of propriety) and emphasizing the vertical, the relationship of the topography with the alchemic dance of the elements in the atmosphere, it begins to tell a different story perhaps, one of symbiosis.
Because these images are a result of both analogue and digital technologies, and there are plenty of hints to both processes in the work, it seems that as a photographer I have stepped outside of my tradition, but as an artist I have begun to explore a new visual language that I am just beginning to understand. The landscape of the high plains has been largely ignored by artists, as it lacks the geographical forms and biological species that are fundamental elements in traditional landscape imagery. It is as if the land was intended for nomadic cultures to move through but never to inhabit or civilize. This couldn’t be more true than when considering the boomtown economy which has been imposed on these grasslands as a result of the oil and gas extraction technology referred to as hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking, as it is called, is a process in which thousands of gallons of water are mixed with tons of sand and chemicals and forced under extremely high pressure to create fissures in the shale formation two miles down below the surface and up to as many miles horizontally in order to extract the embedded oil. It is a relatively expensive process and is only economically viable if the demand for oil is high on the global market. The process has many critics who are concerned with, among other things, the environmental impact the practice has, such as oil spills, ruptured pipelines and oil train derailments as well as the practice of injecting the chemically saturated water back into the earth for permanent storage after it has been used.
Obviously I have concentrated on the machines and structures of the industry. The actual processes only exist visually in the designs and mind’s eye of the engineers and technicians who devised them. Yet the presence of these industrial devices, so concentrated in a geological region of the vast high plains known as the Bakken Shale Formation, might cause us, like Jackson to ask: what is the nature of this culture that interacts with the land in such a manner?
Re-Constructing the Landscape of an Economic Boom
When considering the landscape, through imagery or otherwise, the dialectic of nature and culture is always close at hand. Whether through the lens of J. B. Jackson’s vernacular, where he states that no landscape can be understood without acknowledging and understanding the culture that interacts with it, or Mercea Eliade’s notion that a landscape is a stage in which humans influence nature by speeding it up or slowing it down, a temporal relationship. I would add another role humanity plays in the interaction with the landscape and that is one of collection and dispersion, one of spaciality.
In this series I have imposed the vertical format on a traditionally horizontal subject. By deemphasizing the horizon line, a central element and perspective device in the Western rational treatment of space (and perhaps closely related to the notion of propriety) and emphasizing the vertical, the relationship of the topography with the alchemic dance of the elements in the atmosphere, it begins to tell a different story perhaps, one of symbiosis.
Because these images are a result of both analogue and digital technologies, and there are plenty of hints to both processes in the work, it seems that as a photographer I have stepped outside of my tradition, but as an artist I have begun to explore a new visual language that I am just beginning to understand. The landscape of the high plains has been largely ignored by artists, as it lacks the geographical forms and biological species that are fundamental elements in traditional landscape imagery. It is as if the land was intended for nomadic cultures to move through but never to inhabit or civilize. This couldn’t be more true than when considering the boomtown economy which has been imposed on these grasslands as a result of the oil and gas extraction technology referred to as hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking, as it is called, is a process in which thousands of gallons of water are mixed with tons of sand and chemicals and forced under extremely high pressure to create fissures in the shale formation two miles down below the surface and up to as many miles horizontally in order to extract the embedded oil. It is a relatively expensive process and is only economically viable if the demand for oil is high on the global market. The process has many critics who are concerned with, among other things, the environmental impact the practice has, such as oil spills, ruptured pipelines and oil train derailments as well as the practice of injecting the chemically saturated water back into the earth for permanent storage after it has been used.
Obviously I have concentrated on the machines and structures of the industry. The actual processes only exist visually in the designs and mind’s eye of the engineers and technicians who devised them. Yet the presence of these industrial devices, so concentrated in a geological region of the vast high plains known as the Bakken Shale Formation, might cause us, like Jackson to ask: what is the nature of this culture that interacts with the land in such a manner?