?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(CALIFORNIA OIL INDUSTRY) Album with approximately 290 photographs depicting oil drilling operations leased by the Signal Oil and Gas Company in Huntington Beach, California. With images depicting the vast expanse of oilfields in the Huntington Beach area, just prior to the city's major boom in 1957. Including a typological series of derricks and photographs taken from atop them; oil fields and drilling wells spanning right to the beachfront; mishaps such as pipe corrosion and an overturned mobile derrick truck; and views of men at work during plant construction, operation, beach cleanup, and the literal moving of lease offices. Silver prints, the images measuring 3x4 1/2 and 8x10 inches (7.6x11.4 and 20.3x25.4 cm.), and the reverse, mounted recto only, with corners, up to 4 to a page, but many fewer, some with notations on verso, and nearly every page with a typed heading, captions, locations, and dates. 4to, black leatherette 3-ring binding. 1945-55
During this period, Signal Oil and Gas was the largest independent oil company on the West Coast of America. They were an early adopter of offshore drilling rigs.
