“Ask the Sea”: Marine Poetics and Industrial Forces in Peter Iain Campbell’s North Sea Photography

This paper draws on an Energy Humanities approach and seeks to analyse the depiction and the aestheticisation of Scottish petrocultures, more precisely through the offshore oil and gas industry in the North Sea and how they participate in shaping perceptions and imaginaries of the sea in a changing energy landscape. Peter Iain Campbell is a Scottish photographer whose work focuses on post-industrial landscapes and oil rigs in the North Sea. His survey of landscapes in the process of being decommissioned tends to convey a “petromelancholic aesthetics” (LeMenager), tainted by the “technological sublime” (Nye), and serves as an archive of this isolated and liminal space, tied to its end. This paper examines the tensions and interplays between industrial and marine forces at work in Campbell’s photographs, oscillating between movement and stasis, the graphic and the organic, texture and abstraction. The photographs enable an ecocritical reading of Campbell’s work where the marine element becomes central and “is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence” (Buell), as the photographic series’ title Ask the Sea suggests. Instead, the resistance of the sea arises and turns into an elemental, marine poetics. The sea is given agency and becomes a participant in the creative process of the photographs.