Forgotten Seas

For most people, the world offshore is an unknown. Fascinated by this, Tanja Engelberts began investigating the offshore oil and gas industry. ‘Forgotten Seas’ is the accumulation of six years of research, a journey across the North Sea. Her photographs from her trips on maintenance vessels and on the platforms, as well as historical images, are combined with written anecdotes about life on an oil rig. Each chapter has its own visual language and design, highlighting the raw and complex structures on the sea while evoking a sense of awe and guilt, from the optimism and achievement of the 1950s to the more critical view on the fossil fuel industry today, a landscape slowly disappearing.