Oil Sands by Alan Gignoux, made between 2010 and 2014 in Alberta, Canada, examines how large-scale oil sands extraction around Fort McMurray and Peace River reshapes land, labor, and health. The project frames the Albertan boom as both economic engine and environmental calamity. Gignoux traces how bitumen turned Alberta into a wealthy province with high wages, low taxes, and major infrastructure, while at the same time generating toxic tailings ponds, chronic pollution, and profound risks for nearby communities, especially First Nations. Against this backdrop, the work interrogates global dependence on fossil fuels, the "velvet handcuffs" of well-paid industrial labor, and the political power of an industry that funds its own regulators.
Visually, Oil Sands combines expansive color aerial views with more intimate portraits and testimonies. Large-format landscapes show open-pit mines, upgraders, sulfur mountains, and tailings ponds that occupy former boreal forest, conveying an engineered terrain of scars, grids, and reservoirs. Human narratives are woven into this industrial fabric as brief portrait interventions, so that the voices of workers, doctors, and Woodland Cree residents surface as interruptions inside an otherwise dominant field of machinery and waste. Natural light and subdued palettes support a sober mood that recalls heavy crude oil.
Technically speaking, Gignoux works with handheld aerial photography from a helicopter, using fast shutter speeds, moderate apertures around f/8–f/11, and higher ISOs with a normal-to-slightly-wide lens to retain detail across vast scenes. The project extends into video and recorded interviews, which inform the feature-length documentary Oil Sands: Curse or Blessing?.
Oil Sands won First Prize in the Self-Published Category of the Los Angeles Center of Photography Photobook Journal competition in 2019. The project has been shown internationally, from early exhibitions in London and Brighton to its inclusion in Noorderlicht’s "Taxed to the Max" and the COP26-adjacent "Bruised Lands" exhibition in Glasgow. It forms part of Gignoux’s umbrella project Bruised Lands, which examines the global impact of extreme resource extraction and offers a sustained visual inquiry into the costs of this form of development.
