Drill, baby, drill: William T. Vollmann’s photos of “Ideologies of the Fuel Age”

“We tell our story in gray,” is a programmatic passage in the novel “Europe Central” (2005) by William T. Vollmann – an author with a special artistic position in the USA, from whom, with a delay, one of his often voluminous ones is published Works also appear in Germany. This kaleidoscopic, multicolored gray can now be seen again in Vollmann’s black and white photos for his large research project “Ideologies of the Fuel Age”. It is extremely appropriate to the subject matter of this enormous, irritating, and at times enigmatic book. It’s about fossil fuels, coal, oil, gas, and also nuclear power. We see the ground from which the raw materials are dug, we see the concrete and metal infrastructure that forms our energy production. Seeing tired landscapes, places, people. We see dependencies.