Fifteen years ago, David Campion documented the Alberta oil industry in the throes of the last major downturn in the price of black gold. These never-before-published photographs of workers in the office towers and in the field are telling reminders that booms turn to busts--and that there are still lessons to be learned.
Calgary Herald
Published: Friday, October 31, 2008
Booms are the crack cocaine of the Alberta oilpatch. Corporations' stock values skyrocket. Speculators make fortunes. Governments balance their budgets. Black gold has a trickle-down effect on the entire economy, raising wages, house prices and expectations. Everyone, from companies and politicians to individual citizens, feels justified in believing that the price of oil can only go up.
But, just as with drug binges, tulip manias and housing bubbles, what goes up will also come down--and booms are inevitably followed by busts. In fact, if you define an oil boom as a year in which the price of a barrel jumps more than 10 percent over the price the year before, there have only been a handful of boom years since oil was first commercially developed in North America in the 1850s. The price of oil has been less than $20 a barrel (adjusted for inflation) for about 65 of the past 100 years--and has only topped $40 a barrel for about a dozen years. The rest of the history of this province's key industry has been anything but a sure bet for the thousands of workers employed in the oil fields of Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat, and in the office towers of Calgary and Edmonton.
When these photographs were taken a decade and a half ago, the Alberta oilpatch was well into the longest downturn in the province's history. In 1980, the price of oil had peaked at $44.66 Cdn per barrel--about $115 in 2008 funds--and then plummeted to less than half of that. Never before had a bust lasted so long--five to seven years was more typical--and the industry was reeling from a decade of cutbacks and job losses, with no end in sight to the low price of oil. On May 24, 1992, the Calgary Herald published a series called "Beyond Oil," which turned a critical eye on the exuberance of the boom years, the province's reliance upon petrodollars to balance its books, and the beleaguered industry's arguments for cuts in the royalty rates--all of which seems eerily familiar today. In a Herald story from March 25, 1993 called "After a Restructuring, Imperial Sees Hope," a "rationalization" manager named Bill Kolodinsky explained that, after cutting 5,000 jobs to shrink to its smallest size since it made the 1947 Leduc discovery that launched the Alberta industry, "Imperial Oil's top priority is staying lean and mean to make profits--now." This was a reversal of the company's old approach, which Kolodinsky described as "a systemic bias toward optimism--allowing ourselves to believe that market expansion is just around the corner and that prices and margins will improve." Once again, he could have been talking about today's revisionist mentality, as giants such as EnCana adjust priorities with the daily fluctuations in the price of a barrel of oil.
This never-before-published photo essay by David Campion was shot between 1992 and 1993 and was recently purchased by the National Archives. "I revisited the work a few years ago and found the images had become history," says the photographer, who was born in Britain, grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and South Africa before immigrating to Calgary in 1991. He says he "found Alberta to be a very exotic place," and became entranced by "the two powerful myths of my new home--oil and cowboys" (Campion's series "Cowboy Wild," from a decade of documenting the Calgary Stampede, is on display at the Art Gallery of Calgary until Jan. 3, 2009). "Very distrustful of official voices and stories" because of his experiences under apartheid, Campion set out to see the unprocessed reality of life in the Alberta oilpatch through the eye of his Leica. There was no shot list. No preconceived agenda. No names or captions. Just spontaneous images.
