Writing Wednesday: A Prelude to the Bakken Book

As readers of this blog know, I’m both struggling with my writing habits and working on a book project. This creates a world of highs and lows. This week, for example, I’ve managed both the handwrite in my journal and grind out a few words on my book project. (I also got a couple of nice comments about my blog post yesterday). I’m feeling pretty accomplished right now with a lingering sense of uneasiness that my writing routine could fall apart at any moment.

In any event, I’ve posted some fragments of my book project, but as I’ve been chipping away at it, I’ve come to realize that I had not articulated in writing what the goals of the book are. The vast majority of the book will be photographs and video stills. My publisher urged me to write a rather expansive introduction to both this somewhat unconventional project and that seemed like a reasonable ask. I had originally imagined the entire textual component of the book as an introduction which means that my introduction to this introduction has to be called something else.

Right now, I’ve settled on “Prelude” and it is below:

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 shocked 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 this space 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 photographs and videos to communicate things about the Bakken that scholarly arguments and narratives could not. In fact, our approaches to documenting the Bakken used photographs along side our own efforts to explore the region in non-narrative ways. For example, we included Andrew Cullens’ photographs alongside our tourist guide to the Bakken. Just as we used the form of a tourist guide as a way to present the mobility, multi-temporality, and spatial complexity of the Bakken landscape outside of normal structures of academic narrative, we included these photographs not as illustrations or even as a complement to the text, but as a parallel encounter with the Bakken. Similarly, we included the visual art of John Holmgren and the intimate photos of Bakken residents by Kyle Cassidy alongside work by historians and social scientists on the boom (Holmgren 2016; Cassidy 2016).

Despite understanding the potential of photographs to communicate the contemporary situation in the Bakken landscape, we also made efforts to systematically extract information from the photos. 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.” While enduring the first wave of the COVID outbreak, I assembled all the photographs from one of our research sites in the Bakken (Man Camp 11) into a book with the idea that this would represent more than an archive of our photographs. Instead, 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 modernity, archaeology, photography, and fossil fuels. 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, we recognize the limits of this critique in understanding the complexities of the Bakken as both a particular place and as an expression of wider petroleumscape. It is our 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.