Writing Wednesday: Getting Back to the Bakken

This week I finally opened my “book document” in Scrivener. As readers of this blog (with good memories) might recall, I worked most of the spring on book that will focus on the photographs that we took of one particular site in the Bakken. My originally idea was to present the photos with very little in the way of interpretive text, but my editors urged me to explain myself more fully and provide some introduction to the larger project in the Bakken as well as this particular volume.

Here’s a rough draft of the photographs and interviews to be included in the book. You can trace some of the book’s themes through the blog posts here. 

In the spring, I got through the most of my discussion about how I was approaching our photographs in the Bakken. The key thing with my volume is that it will not conform to the traditional practice of ethnography or archaeological photography that often present photographs as evidence for something else. They are not representative or illustrative of the modern, late-capitalist world. Instead, my manuscript argues that we cannot separate these photographs from the Bakken oil boom, from the work force housing site where we took them, or from the “contemporary situation.” As a result, the photographs cannot exist outside of an understanding of the Bakken oil boom and the Bakken oil boom does not exist outside of the modern world that privileged photographic documentation as a way to perceive reality. The mutual entanglement of photographs and the modern world complicates how archaeologists use them to understand reality.

(As an aside, one of the fun things I’ve started to do in conjunction with this project is take more photographs in and of my daily life. This is encouraging me to think of photography as more than just a practice of documentation, but as a process of making. This work is not only helping me experience photography as an embedded praxis that is part of existing in the modern world. I’ve been using older (er vintage?) lenses on my camera to force me to engage with the process of photography in a more hands-on way. This is helping me bring my research to my everyday life in a new and enjoyable [if occasionally inconvenient] way as photography becomes less of a technical skill, set apart by its association with objective reproduction, and more an embodied manifestation of being in the world.) 

The practical result of this is that the textual sections of my book do not refer directly to the photographs or what appears in them. Instead, the text and the photographs offer discrete but overlapping the arguments for how the Bakken manifests the conditions of late capitalism and late modernity.

In terms of practical matters, the manuscript as it now stands is around 12k words. I still need to develop a narrative of the project and the Bakken oil boom with the kind of basic details about their origins and trajectory. As part of that I need to incorporate a more review of recent work on petroculture, oil booms, and late capitalism with references to the Bakken.

I also have to fill in references throughout and make sure that the rather skeletal text that I prepared last spring. First step, though is to read the entire thing and make sure that I says what I intended it to say. 

Away we go!