This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change.

中文翻译：

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石油媒体：美国、科威特和瑞士之间视觉文化中石油形象的变化

本文考察了视觉文化中 20 世纪中期石油媒体的三个案例——石油相关的图像、肖像和媒体：在美国出版的一系列名为“石油的故事”的科普书籍，一套以石油为主题的科威特邮票（1959 年）和苏黎世艺术展（1956 年）题为Welt des Erdöls： Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie（石油世界：年轻艺术家看到一个行业））。虽然描绘原油在其自然栖息地是 20 世纪初美国的一个常见摄影主题，但讨论的材料表明，到 20 世纪中叶，原油不再具有相同的视觉存在。三个案例研究中的石油图像越来越依赖于石油基础设施的图像和对生活在石油现代性或石油文化中的特定背景描述，这意味着以廉价化石能源为燃料的生活方式。然而，重要的不仅仅是石油视觉表现的变化。任何关于石油的可见性和不可见性的辩论都必须考虑石油已经通过视觉传达的媒介——即石油媒介化的精确形式。化石物质转化为化石能源的过程中的非物质化，以及公众想象中的提取地点与生产和消费地点的脱钩。随着石油文化已经演变成国家甚至全球文化（而不仅仅是代表众多可能的能源来源），石油媒体为我们与依赖化石能源的生活方式的密切关系铺平了道路，而化石能源是世界上最大的驱动力之一。气候变化。