The Visual Power of Oil Culture. And How to Read Images in a Cross-Regional Perspective

In the twentieth century, oil companies played a decisive role in producing and disseminating information on petroleum to the general public across the globe. The creation and distribution of children’s board games, magazines, books, films or postage stamps that directly or indirectly related to petroleum did often not take place in the same cultural context. The transnational setup of many powerful oil conglomerates meant that they operated in more than one country and often more than one region of the Global South, while their headquarters and main PR departments were located in the Global North. For example, BP produced some of its promotional material in London and in English and then distributed it in Kuwait. The written components of such material were sometimes translated into Arabic to address local or regional audiences, but not the images. At other times, films and photographs taken in Kuwait were integrated into brochures that were circulated amongst stakeholders in Britain and the US. The central question is: How to read images of oil in a cross-regional perspective? What do we know about oil companies’ strategies to control the reception of its imagery and how were such promotional images consummated and perceived? The paper will present several cases of image transfer between Kuwait and England as well as typical oil tropes presented on postage stamps issued in the Middle East and Latin America during the mid-twentieth century as a starting point to think about the visual readability of oil imagery in a cross-regional perspective, meaning both South-North and South-South connections. Far from providing final answers, it aims at stimulating a discussion on the circulating of images during the age of oil, the power relations implied in their production and dissemination, as well as the question of (cross-cultural) visual literacy between oil propaganda and subversive counteractions