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Elemore Morgan Sr. (American/Louisiana, 1903-1966) "Week's Bayou on Week's Island" and "Log Cabin Settlement on the River", ca. 1950-1952 two silver gelatin prints both with Standard Oil Co., N.J., photo credit stamps en verso. Matted, glazed and framed alike. each sheet 11" x 14" Provenance: Standard Oil of New Jersey Photographic Collection. Literature: Illustrated: "Week's Bayou on Week's Bay" in Carter Hodding, John Law Wasn't So Wrong: [The Story of Louisiana's Horn of Plenty, Baton Rouge: Esso Standard Oil Co., 1952, np. (table of contents). Notes: These rare photographs chronicle not only the rich landscape and history of Louisiana portrayed through the lens of a native Acadian, but their commission also informs the history of the Standard Oil Company in the state and comprises an important photographic archive of both the nation and region. In the early 1940s, Elemore Morgan Sr., an architectural draftsman and tire store owner from Baton Rouge, turned to photography, creating an important visual record of Louisiana architecture, rural life, customs and flora and fauna. In 1943, his early photographs were illustrated in Harnett Kane's, Bayous of Louisiana; in the late 1940s, Morgan collaborated with novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes to publish a state-wide historical narrative titled All This Is Louisiana. At the same time Morgan launched his photography career, the Standard Oil Company embarked on a campaign of expansion and assimilation in Louisiana, employing film and PR to integrate its burgeoning refineries into the fabric of rural Cajun life. In 1948, they produced the Louisiana Story, a narrative film about a young Cajun boy and his pet raccoon, whose family's financial insolvency is solved after the elderly patriarch allows the oil company to drill oil from an inlet behind their home. Directed by Robert Flaherty and set on location with local residents for actors, the film's cinematography and its Cajun music score (performed by the Philadelphia Symphony) is a celebration of Acadia that inculcates oil into the terrain through the active participation of its people.1. Following the Louisiana Story, the Standard Oil Company commissioned Elemore Morgan to photograph the state for a book on the history of Louisiana, dedicated to the people of Louisiana, which similarly inserted its drilling and refineries into its history. Written by Hodding Carter, John Law Wasn't So Wrong recasts Law, the French economists who lured Frenchmen to the new world through the promise of an earthly paradise full of virgin land, as a hero, not the scoundrel the new immigrants found him to be for failing to mention the mosquito-ridden swamps that bred alligators and malaria. These photographs were part of this epic project; thirty-one of the photos Morgan took were published in this book, including "Week's Bayou on Week's Island". In 1953, the photographs, including twenty-four of a wildcat oil well, were commemorated in a show at Louisiana State University, titled "Photographs of Louisiana"; and in 1987, the Natural History Museum in Lafayette (now Lafayette Science Museum) paid tribute to Morgan and the Standard Oil project in an exhibit titled "Postwar to Prosperity? (Louisiana 1946-1950): Images from the Standard Oil of New Jersey Photographic Collection." The documentary photography Morgan and the Standard Oil Company created represents an important exchange between indigeneity and industry, and are preserved in the permanent collections of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Louisiana State University, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the Lafayette Science Museum. 1.Louisiana Story was nominated for an Academy Award and the music score won a Pulitzer Prize, the only score in the history of Hollywood to earn such an accolade. References: Carter, Hodding. John Law Wasn't So Wrong: [The Story of Louisiana's Horn of Plenty]. Esso Standard Oil Co.: Baton Rouge, 1952; "Elemore Morgan Photos of State Will Be Shown". Times Ad