Writing Wednesday: A Prelude to a new Bakken Book

It’s been a hectic start to the semester, and I’m struggling a bit to find a rhythm. That said, I am gaining some momentum and back to writing a few days a week on my book project. 

Here’s the recently revised and expanded prelude. 

This book is the manifestation of an ill formed project.

Starting in 2012, a group of scholars began taking regular treks to the Bakken oil patch of Western North Dakota during the oil boom that shook the western part of the state. Our goal was to document what was happening across the region with a loose focus on work force housing. Our main plan to document what was happening across this vast area of over a half-a-million square kilometers involved archaeological notebooks, preprinted forms, and sketch pads, but within hours of our first experiences, we soon discovered that photography would be the main way of documenting the expansive complexity of the contemporary situation. Over the next eight years, we collected massive quantities of photographs, videos, and notes from work force housing sites across the region. We were able to use these photographs to write a number of articles and book chapters on work force housing in the Bakken.

Despite their basic utility, I remained haunted by the potential of these visual media (photographs and videos) to communicate things about the Bakken that scholarly arguments and narratives could not. The use of photography and video manifested our larger approach to documenting the Bakken and complemented our own efforts to explore the region in non-narrative ways. As an early manifestation of this, we included Andrew Cullens’ photographs alongside our tourist guide to the Bakken (Caraher and Weber 2017). While I will discuss this volume at greater length later, our tourist guide adapted a non-academic genre to present the mobility, multi-temporality, and spatial complexity of the Bakken landscape in a non-narrative way. We organized the guide according to legs of a trip through the region, but the movement of our putative tourist neither paralleled historic developments or the process of discovering, extracting, transporting, and refining oil. The text describes instead the episodic and emergent character of extractive regimes encountered across the region. We included photographs taken by Andrew Cullen, a freelance photographer deeply familiar with North Dakota and Bakken landscapes, in our tourist guide not as illustrations or even as a complement to the text, but as a parallel encounter with the region. The tourist guide and our collaboration with Andrew Cullen continued an approach that Kyle Conway and I initiated when we included work by photographers Kyle Cassidy, John Holmgren, and others in our 2016 volume The Bakken Goes Boom. John Holmgren’s work in particular sought to layer images produced by our research in the Bakken with those associated with assumptions about workforce housing. These images stood alongside work by historians and social scientists on the boom (Holmgren 2016; Cassidy 2016). Cassidy’s intimate portraits of Bakken denizens likewise open personal windows into the complexities of the people and the situation. This is a feature shared with many of the images that appeared in the Plains Art Museum exhibit titled “Bakken Boom!” and the corresponding catalogue that also appeared in the volume. 

Despite these early efforts to understand the potential of photographs and other non-narrative forms of engagement to communicate the contemporary situation in the Bakken landscape, we also made efforts to systematically extract information from the photos. We attempted to “mine” the photographs for evidence that would help us understand work force housing the Bakken (Liming xxxx). This work produced more data, but no more understanding. Moreover, the task was arduous, the data was reductive, and my interpretations often amounted to nothing more than “many residents in the Bakken stored water coolers outside their RVs.” In other cases, I found it difficult to escape from seeing the photographs as evidence for arguments that I had already made on the basis of systematic field work or descriptions recorded on our voluminous notes. A some point, while producing large quantities of simplistic or redundant observations, I despaired of using our photographs in any constructive way. My despair largely derived from my expectation that photographs would serve as representations of archaeological observations produced during my time in the field or they served as the basis for some form of extractive analysis where I would. This expectation prevented me from seeing the photographs as an artifacts in their own right.  

While enduring the first wave of the COVID outbreak, I returned to the photographs with fresh eyes. Instead of subjecting them to some form of extractive analysis or studying them as representations of a now disappeared (or at very least inaccessible) landscape, I assembled all the photographs from one of our research sites in the Bakken (Man Camp 11) into a book. The idea was to create an archive of our photographs that freed them from the burden of representation or from the prying pressures of extractive practices. In place of these more common approaches to understanding photographs, the book would present the photographs as a kind of open-ended visual argument grounded in our encounter with work forcing housing in the Bakken during the oil boom.

Unfortunately, I struggled to articulate my original vision of this book, and publishers remained skeptical. The following volume seeks to retain my original vision of the book while also offering a substantive introductory essay that grounds the photographs not only in our efforts to document the lives of workers (and their families) who came to the Bakken to labor in the oil boom as well as the entanglement between archaeology, photography, fossil fuels and and modernity. Efforts to disentangle the connections between the human experience of the Bakken and our disciplinary dependence on fossil fuels and modern ways of seeing and recording has (and will continue) to produce certain kinds of disciplinary and social knowledge. The following essay directs the reader to most of our particular research in the Bakken. At the same time, I recognize the limits of this critique in understanding the complexities of the Bakken as both a particular place and as an expression of a global petroleumscape. It is my hope that the following essay and photographs provides future scholars with a window into our engagement with the Bakken and preserves the potential for a broader critique of our work and the situation in North Dakota in the early 21st century. 

The book is organized around four parts of three chapters each. The first part of this book starts with our fieldwork in the Bakken oil patch. Three short chapters provide some preliminary remarks on the North Dakota oil boom, the study of work force housing, and the character of the following book.

 The second part of the book situates our work amid recent debates on the role of archaeology in providing critical perspectives not only on the development of the modern industrialized world, but also on our contemporary society. Industrial archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary world are, in many ways, the archaeology of fossil fuels and during the 20th and 21st century, and this means the archaeology of oil. 

The third set of three chapters further excavates the relationship between oil and modernity and pays particularly attention to the role that oil played in the unprecedented mobility of the modern world. The very viscosity of oil made it easy to transport and made it essential to the working of aircraft and automobile engines. This introduced a new era of mobility which allowed and sometimes required individuals to move at the increasing speed of capital. Workforce housing in the Bakken represents just one expression of the accelerating world powered by petroleum. At the same time, a desire for stability and fixity continued to influence the shape of domestic life. The desire for property ownership, in particular, seem to defy the dynamic mobility of the modern age. 

Photography represented another manifestation of the tension between the fixity and mobility. The final part of this book makes the argument that photography sought to capture the dynamism of the modern world by creating a sense of fixity and stability. Photography not only sought to create a sense of permanence amid the mobility and contingency of the modern world. This effort to create permanence through the practice of photography relied on strategies of fragmentation. Efforts to isolate moments in the continuous experience of the modernity created a sense of fragmentation. This influenced modernist writers and thinkers who argued for the disintegration of the human experience and challenged the capacity of narrative to reproduce reality. Archaeologists have similarly come to recognize the distinct role of photography in the discourse of modernity. 

The conclusion recognizes photography as a key tool in documenting the modern world and this situates photography as a key tool for understanding the central role that oil and other carbon based fuels has played in the formation of the contemporary world and will play in defining our increasingly perilous future. Our project used photography — the quintessentially modern instrument for reproducing reality — as a way to document the homes of oil field workers.