One Image, Two Acts

Thick pipes cut across the rocky desert in photos from British Petroleum’s archive. In parallel to the infrastructure for oil production in southern Iran, the company also created an extensive image archive. Film and photographs not only recorded industrial development, but also the workers and society. Oil and progress are inextricably intertwined in these images. Later on, a network of cinemas was created, providing modern entertainment to the population.

Sanaz Sohrabi edits, superimposes and comments on these historic images, relating a different history, one which shows the effects monopolisation and natural resource extraction had on the internal political situation. It also shows how, ultimately, the system created to produce and disseminate these images was ultimately reclaimed by the developing anti-colonial film movement: the Iranian New Wave.