Visualizing Oil in Aramco World Magazine: Public Relations and Corporate Photography from 1949-1960

Abstract

In 1949, almost fifteen years after the first oil well was discovered by a group of American wildcatters on the Eastern Arabian Peninsula, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) ramped up its public relations campaign by launching a company house magazine with a strong photographic program. The publication, Aramco World Magazine, was initially produced out of the New York office as a way to communicate company activities to employees. As the decade progressed, the magazine expanded its scope to serve a broader audience, covering trivia about the Middle East, world events, lifestyle tips, and, of course, oil operations.

This thesis examines how the images circulated in the magazine worked towards the company’s public relations aim of creating a “favorable business climate” for the oil company and industry. It demonstrates how, through its circulation, the magazine concretized a culture of corporate citizenship among employees and countered negative sentiment directed at the company both from within and abroad. It concludes that the images that depicted a range of company operations, from compound activities and personnel portraits to infrastructure projects and oil machinery, conjured a fantasy of oil, one that could appeal to American expatriate employees and their families, and buttress the company’s role as a leading global enterprise. The analysis in this thesis not only reveals how the world of Aramco was visualized through the magazine, but also identifies the actors who engineered this visualization, and reveals the corporate community that were influenced by these visuals.