ARAMCO photographs of oil facilities in Saudi Arabia

The collection of ARAMCO photographs of oil facilities in Saudi Arabia consists of images created by several photographers working for the Arabian-American Oil Company, or ARAMCO, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including V.K. Antony, E.E. Seal, T.F. Walters, Khalid Nasr, and Russell Lee, as well as several uncredited photographers. Most of the photographs have credit stamps on the verso of the print, identiying them as "Aramco Photographs" and listing the photographer, but several only have handwritten annotations.

The images depict a number of various facets of ARAMCO's operations at that time, including geological and seismological surveys, drilling operations, gas separating facilities, oil refineries, and shipping terminals, mostly in locations in eastern Saudi Arabia such as Abqaiq, Ain Dar, and Ras Tanura, but also including images from the Rub' al Khali desert. Several images also depict Saudi staff working in various capacities, as well as a couple of images of American personnel, and one image of the Board of Directors of the company seated at a meeting. A few photographs are not identified, and may have been copy prints obtained from other sources, perhaps for use in a planned publication.

While very little is known of the provenance of this group of photographs, the one common feature is that almost all of the prints have an ownership stamp on the verso of Sherry Brown, of Bellingham, Washington. An issue of the company publication "Sun and Flare" identified someone by this name as a child, in a news story about about a youth theatrical production in the late 1950s, and further identified her as the daughter of Dr. Grover F. Brown, the chief agronomist for ARAMCO. All of the photographs have handwritten captions, many of them identifying the location, activities, and people depicted in images, as well as the dates, and it is likely that Ms. Brown could have been the author of these captions.