Drawing the line on oil in Petrochemical America

Abstract

Petrochemical America, an art book and atlas cocreated by photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff, is a rejoinder to commonplaces about oil’s invisibility and evasion of representation. The book’s visualizations produce a narrative atlas that depicts the oil industry’s transformations of US landscapes and communities. Central to this depiction is Orff’s use of the line, a form essential to visualization technique. Orff’s lines go deep rather than “look across” surfaces to tell stories of growth, fragmentation, toxicity, and displacement. Detailing the affordances of the line as a tool of atlas making and mapmaking, this article argues that Petrochemical America employs lines in ways that stage the oppositional logics at the heart of the petrochemical industry, that is, its tactical recruitment of vertical and horizontal, natural and human made, visible and invisible, proximity and dispersal, and containment and contamination. Without purporting to expose the hidden and without reproducing deterministic narratives of petrochemical dominance, Orff promotes ways of apprehending oil’s pasts, presents, and futures.