For six years, Tanja Engelberts travelled the North Sea, boarding maintenance vessels and offshore platforms to photograph the oil and gas infrastructure that most of us never see. The result is *Forgotten Seas*, published by The Eriskay Connection in 2023: 216 pages that bring together her documentary photographs with historical images she collected along the way, alongside written anecdotes about life on a rig and her own travel experiences at sea.
The book is structured as a passage through changing attitudes. It opens on the optimism of the 1950s, when drilling in the North Sea seemed to prove that nature had been mastered, and moves toward a more critical view of the fossil fuel industry and its future, including the destruction of the first platforms. Each chapter adopts its own visual language and design, so that the raw, complex structures at sea are registered differently from section to section, evoking a sense of awe and guilt. Jeff Diamanti contributes an essay; Rob van Hoesel designed the volume; Heleen Schröder was the proofreader.
Engelberts does not treat the offshore world as spectacle. She approaches it as an archive, sifting her own documentary work together with found historical material and first-hand accounts from the people who work there. That combination gives the book its particular weight: it is neither a survey of engineering nor a polemic, but a sustained act of attention to an industrial landscape that is now being unbuilt. The 204 × 300 mm format, exposed softcover, and dust jacket give the sequence room to breathe and to hold the tension between grandeur and damage.
For collectors, the appeal lies in that editing and design intelligence — a six-year body of research shaped into a book whose chapters think through their material rather than illustrating a thesis. It is a testament of seventy years of gas and oil drilling in the North Sea, an industrial landscape that is slowly disappearing. The first edition is limited to 1000 copies.