“Photography versus the Pest”: Shell Chemicals, Visual Media, and Pesticides in Postwar Britain

This article explores the intersections between industrial agriculture, mass media, and extraction. Examining color photographs and films produced by the oil and chemicals corporation Royal Dutch Shell, it shows how visual media helped to normalize the use of petroleum-derived pesticides in Britain in the years after the Second World War. Films and photographs created by the Shell Photographic Unit and the Shell Film Unit “naturalized” the company’s marketing of pesticide products, helping farmers to visualize their insect and fungi “enemies” while eliding or obscuring the long-term environmental and social risks that these chemicals posed. The material basis of these brightly colored films and photographs was itself entangled with the chemical revolution as they entered a global distribution market that was a product of the twentieth century’s fossil fuel culture. These images help us to make sense of the threads linking industrial agriculture, extraction, and corporate sponsorship precisely at the time when petroleum and its chemical by-products were changing the world beyond recognition.