Robert Ladislas Derr





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Oil City, 2007

This photograph captures a vista perspective of Oil City through a curtain of oil. Sitting on a hilltop with my camera peering over the city and focusing on the largest building in the city, the Oil City Bank, I pour a quart of oil over the lens of the camera clouding the landscape as well as the bank. The quart of oil like the dollar is a discrete quantity of measure that functions in the larger economic system. In 1859, Colonel Edwin L. Drake launched the first successful oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. After this, Venango County became synonymous with the petroleum industry, and Oil City sprang up as the headquarters for Pennzoil, Quaker State, Wolf’s Head, among others. An economic depression descended on Oil City as the oil companies relocated to Texas.
color digital print, 44" x 68", 2007

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