Scenes of Extraction

An archival constellation created with the still and moving images of British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British energy complex that spanned Iran, but also reached other British oil operations in South East Asia. Weaving through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “Reflection Seismology” method for oil exploration, the film unpacks the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies, and the visual history of resource extraction in Iran.