April 3–June 1, 2014 in the Weitz Center Commons
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), created after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, consists of up to 727 million barrels of crude oil in four underground storage facilities along the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. The oil is stored below ground in multiple naturally occurring salt caverns.
Artist Paul Shambroom set out to photograph these inconspicuous installations in 2008. SPR sites comprise pipes, some tanks, a few maintenance buildings, equipment and a few personnel. Even though it is completely legal to photograph anything visible from public land and roads, Shambroom engaged in lengthy negotiations with the Department of Energy in order to photograph from outside the sites without hindrance.
To meet the challenge of photographing a subject that cannot be seen (the oil), the photographer took inspiration from 17th-century Dutch landscape paintings. Capturing the land and water over the storage cavern from distant vantage points, Shambroom presents an ironic vision of peace and prosperity. As the artist writes, “The hundreds of millions of barrels of oil beneath these idyllic landscapes offer a very thin veneer of protection to our economy and way of life.”