Aerial visions, colonial imprints: visualizing the Athabasca oil sands through landscape photography

In recent years, critical geography and visual culture studies have increasingly turned to the role of media and how they shape the ways environments are understood and governed. Among these, landscape photography plays a central role in mediating environmental change, making it either visible or obscure, legible or mythologized. This essay critically examines the aesthetic, ideological, and affective work performed by aerial photographs of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada, particularly those by Edward Burtynsky and Louis Helbig, arguing that these images often participate in a colonial optic rooted in the logic of terra nullius. While their photographs critique the devastation of extractive industry, some also reproduce perceptual habits in which land appears empty, labor invisible, and development inevitable. Situated at the intersection of media aesthetics and decolonial visuality studies, this essay interrogates the frameworks through which land, labor, wilderness, and infrastructural power are made perceptible or erased. In doing so, it contributes to recent debates on petroculture, colonial visuality, and the aesthetics of environmental violence.