The material flows of oil have always facilitated the global movements of culture in the 20th century, shaping what is referred to as oil modernity in Energy Humanities. The relationship between the materiality of oil and culture, however, is neither unidirectional nor unmediated and unproblematic. Oil corporations have played a crucial role in actively creating a web of cultural practices, values and symbols in which the production, transport and consumption of oil is imbedded and sustained over time. This cultural reproduction of oil modernity has addressed workers of oil corporations, consumers of oil products, and political elites in a context of established cultures. Therefore, oil modernity has been contested and shaped by these actors and pre-existing cultures, particularly in the (semi-)colonial context of the Middle East in which it was advocated by international oil companies. These themes are explored through the lens of the publications and magazines of the oil corporations and professional organizations in Iran from 1908 to 1979 (Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and the National Iranian Oil Company). Looking at the texts and images in these publications, this paper retrieves the cultural mechanisms through which they created an imagined community of the employees of the oil industry by defining them as missionaries of modernity in Iran. The cultural impact of these publications went beyond the workforce of the oil corporations, however, as they used oil to represent a new cultural era that defined being modern, including how citizens dressed or educated their children. At the same time, these representations reveal the contradictions of the resulting hybrid modernity in which images from Iran’s ancient past are revived and the ruler is omnipresent. The cultural mechanisms of this oil modernity are explored in relations to three specific themes of cultural representation in the publications of oil companies: work, gender and consumption. The seemingly stable notion of modernity that they convey is problematized by analyzing the silent, hidden and contradictory representations of oil that reveal the fractious relations between the oil company, its employees, and the state.