Tanja Engelberts – Forgotten Seas

Review by Matt Schneider •

“fever days

fleets erected at a dazzling pace

rigs roaming the seas

sonar boats scanning the ocean floor

young men recruited

fortunes made

conquering frontiers

establishing capitalism” (p. 77)

Forgotten Seas, by photographer, Tanja Engelberts, is a hefty photobook. By this, I mean that it is large, yes. The book is 216 pages and the 7 ¾ x 11 ¾ matte pages regularly feature multiple photos. But more importantly, the book presents a weighty argument about the permanent, if forgotten, alteration of our physical seascapes. Heavier still, Forgotten Seas calls attention to a tension that should be on all our minds – a tension between the promise of technological advancement and environmental/ecological consequence, including, but not limited to, climate change.

On my first pass through Forgotten Seas, I was drawn to the physical architecture so expertly captured. When viewing oil rigs of varying sizes, arrangements, and states of repair, I was struck by two feelings. The first — and perhaps from where the photobook draws its title — was a sense of foreignness. Regardless of my feelings about continued dependence on fossil fuels, there is something interesting, frustrating even, about the fact that these ugly and beautifully intricate marvels of engineering are so unfamiliar, forgotten. Much of the world I inhabit is powered by oil and natural gas siphoned from below the ocean floor, but I am never confronted by them, nor directly impacted by the environmental burdens they impose (climate change being the exception). I was secondly struck by a feeling of loneliness. I have no idea what it is like to live and work on an offshore oil rig. Yet, when I look at photographs of small, solitary metal structures dropped into the vast North Sea, how am I to imagine it as anything but isolating? What must it be like to spend weeks on end, knowing that you are a part of a network of rigs, but that this network is spread across untold distances, connected only by giant ocean liners, helicopters, and endless waters?

And it is here that Engelberts’ theme of “forgotten” took on a deeper meaning for me. There is a human component to these structures that is hard to place. To provide comment on offshore energy production is to comment on offshore labor. Rigs are not only giant steel beams. They are people performing tasks, even if forgotten or actively rendered invisible. Throughout the book, Engelberts provides her own photographs, as well as archival photographs, of men clad in safety orange and hard hats, working diligently to assemble, erect, maintain, and even disassemble offshore rigs. Yet, the photos and author notes that I felt most moved by were those in which human presence was implied, but not shown: a locker room with orange jackets hanging, an empty dining room, helicopter pads kept clear and empty, entire rigs seemingly vacant.

Last, but not least, as grand and colossal as these structures are, there is a temporariness suggested by Engelberts. She writes:

“a stable presence at sea

placed to produce

day in day out

day by night

night by day

platforms fully automated

some holding a skeleton crew

the soft rush of gas moving through pipes

unthinkable depths connected

sucking out precious fuels

built for a generation” (p. 95).

It is only here where I question whether I agree with Engelberts. Is it fair to suggest that these technologies are any less built for someone like me, a millennial, or for the generations that follow? Are we any less complicit than the generations who erected these monuments of capital and extraction? Is the final section of this book, titled “Decommission,” meant to imply a move away fossil fuel extraction? Whatever Engelberts’ position on these questions, it made me think of similar issues of industrial extraction and environmental impact that persist. For example, despite significant American interest in a clean energy transition and major steps taken by the Biden Administration toward a (supposedly) “Green New Deal,” social, political, and technical barriers to achieving such a feat remain. Worldwide oil production hit an all-time high in 2019, and production has been recovering since taking a step back during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Even as industrial equipment, whether offshore oil rigs or hydraulic fracturing wells, falls into disuse and is forgotten, the burdens these technologies pose to local ecologies and communities remain. And there is no guarantee that investment in renewable energy technologies will be “green,” be just, break from existing logics of extraction, or even replace reliance on fossil fuels.

Thus, my favorite part of Forgotten Seas is that it asks us to consider what we might learn about the future by observing the life (and afterlife) of oil rigs. In various ways, Engelberts draws attention to the negative consequences that have followed heavy investment in offshore fossil fuel infrastructure. Yet, in the archival section of this book, there is a sense of accomplishment and optimism. Offshore oil rigs, made possible through modern engineering, represented opportunity. They represented progress. They were a way to meet and expand our energy needs by tapping into previously unused resources lying beneath the ocean floor. In these attitudes, I cannot help but see a similarity between offshore fossil fuel extraction and the current interest in expanding renewable energies. As we engineer larger and larger wind turbines and designate swaths of rural lands for solar farms, are we also blinded by our faith in technological innovation?

To be clear, we find ourselves in a climate crisis largely because of decisions made in decades past (and decisions we continue to make), and I don’t mean to suggest that renewable energy has no place in responsible and equitable responses to climate change. It might. For me, however, Forgotten Seas highlights that technological innovation alone will not solve the climate conundrum. Instead, we might learn from decisions made in decades past. Perhaps works like Forgotten Seas will spur us to better attend to the social, political, and environmental conditions in which we make energy-related decisions.

Forgotten Seas is both a work of history and a comment on the future. It is an incredibly thoughtful and thorough work, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Matt Schneider is a professor and sociologist in Whiteville, North Carolina.

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Forgotten Seas, Tanja Engelberts

Photographer/author: Tanja Engelberts, born Deventer, The Netherlands and resides in The Hague, The Netherlands

Language: English

Softcover, softbound, printed by Jos Morree (Fine Books), ISBN: 978-9492051936

designer: Rob van Hoesel

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