Gallery

Brian Black focuses on four iconographies of petroleum in the lives of the US people. Brian refers to a photograph by Colonel Edwin Drake and a local druggist Peter Wilson, showing the birth of hydrocarbon use and the first example of a derrick structure that would predominate the early oil fields of Pennsylvania. Brian refers to the Lewis Evans Map of 1755 that offers important insight into an era when petroleum had not been considered as an energy commodity. Brian also refers to the third image that displays Americans' twentieth-century relationship to the ecology of oil O. Winston Link photographed 'Hot Shot East Bound,' on August 2, 1956, to depict small-town American life at the end of an era. The last image showing a political cartoon from 2008 suggests that American consumers have an important role to play in crunch energy situation in the present times.