Where Pathos Rules: The visual culture of the Resource Curse

Time: 10:00-11:30
Venue: Bergen Resource Centre for International Development

Owen Logan is photographer and Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Owen works with the 'Lives in the Oil Industry' oral history project in the Department of History at the university, and is currently working between Scotland and Nigeria. He is participating as a researcher and photographer in the CMI project Flammable Societies - Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas.

His photographic work, including 'Al Maghrib' photographs from Morocco with stories by Paul Bowles,(Polygon 1989), 'Bloodlines - vite allo specchio', forward by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Cornerhouse 1994) and a forthcoming book 'Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria' with Uzor Maxim Uzoatu has been widely exhibited. His photographs are in several major art collections including the permanent collection of the Scottish Parliament. His work is examined in scholarly publications including 'Raw Histories - Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, by Elizabeth Edwards, (Berg 2001) 'Scottish Photography: A History' by Tom Normand (Luath 2008) and 'Living in a Globalised World' (Open University 2006).

In this presentation Logan compares the social development of realism in the 20th century up to the 1940s in Europe and America with the more institutionalised representation of the “third world” from the 1950s and onwards. In this latter period he focuses particularly on the resource curse and what this indicates about the acquisition of social and political capital within a history of cultural/political representation.

There will also be an exhibit of Owen's photo-essay work about the global oil economy in the Resource Centre.