Based on a close reading of photographs depicting the local workforce and their working and living environments in magazines and photo albums produced by the Arabian American Oil Company, Iraq Petroleum Company, Kuwait Petroleum Company and Bahrain Petroleum Company this paper engages with the corporate history and practice of public relations oil photography in the Arab World in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores the ‘fields of vision’ of the oil company as a corporation, and the combination of technology and human agency that underpinned the creation and circulation of these images, with particular reference to the interaction between company photographers, cameras as technological devices key to the reproduction of labour, workers as photographic subjects and the images’ intended publics. Labour-related photographs will be also analysed as evidence of the companies’ values and concepts of work and social relations, and of their power to create imaginary sociologies and geographies of petroleum production in order to entertain, instruct and ultimately subdue the workforce. It is argued that photography depicting local workers provided models for the new corporate lives of oil that made acceptable the introduction of modern material and professional cultures, the transformation of living spaces and natural environments and the exploitative and often discriminatory practices of foreign companies that controlled oil extraction in the Arab World until nationalisation. In interpreting photographs as instruments of social construction and persuasion that served the reproduction of labour this paper also analyses some images in conjunction with stories of oil development published in the companies’ press which were set in specific spaces of petroleum corporate life, particularly the oil township and the suburban villa, with a view to disclosing the companies’ ‘fields of vision’ on social relations, family life and domesticity.