Natural gas flare, White Earth River Valley, September 2013, by Sarah Christianson

“We all wanted this oil development. We just didn’t know what we were in for. Even half of what we got would’ve been too much.”—Carole Freed, fourth-generation rancher, Watford City, ND, May 2013

No single photograph in Sarah Christianson’s When the Landscape Is Quiet Again: North Dakota’s Oil Boom gets one’s blood boiling. Her images of her home state—which has, in several booms since the early ’50s, changed from a predominantly agrarian economy to an industrial one based around oil extraction—elicit a slower-burning experience of rage. Rather than focusing on obvious signs of destruction, Christianson’s photographs (paired here with generously informative captions) collectively emphasize the insidiousness of the waste and danger that are often hiding in plain sight.

Christianson occasionally enhances the tone of a scene through dramatic framing. A well on the border of a farmstead is shown through venetian blinds from the interior of the farmhouse, like an intruder spotted by the besieged protagonists of a horror film. In another photograph, several wells perch over a cornfield like so many robotic farmhands, while in the foreground, a tiny sign along the bank of a sludge creek warns of hazardous chemicals in the area. But in most of the other photographs, the land’s exploitation and its sinister effects are depicted even more subtly, or are invisible altogether. Christianson doesn’t overlook the abandoned wells, the disturbed earth along the pipelines, or the swirls of black oil collecting at a spill site, but this is not disaster porn. Rather, by not focusing solely on these more ostentatious (and expected) pieces of evidence, Christianson’s photographs convey something scarier about the degree to which fracking, mining, and drilling have become an irrevocable part of North Dakota’s ecosystem and its inhabitants’ way of life. (continue reading)