Chris Jordan - Photography and image making for environmental issues
Chris Jordan - Running the Numbers
It is easy to get numbed out by statistics as 3.6 million SUV are sold in one year or 106,000 aluminum cans are used every 30 seconds. Chris Jordan helps us to put these numbers in a more human, visual terms with his new body of work called Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait. 2006 - 2007. Each of his images depicts a certain number of items - such as 213,000 Vicodin tabs. His images usually have some environmental, sociological or political context and are powerfully arranged to heighten dramatic impact. One image (detail shown in the image above) shows Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte made out of 106,000 aluminum cans. Of particular interest to me was his photograph of plastic bags, where he shows 60,000 plastic bags, the number of plastic bags used in the US every five seconds. Seeing all those bags really hits you on a visceral level just how overwhelming the problem of plastic bag pollution really is.
Be sure to check out his earlier work, Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption 2003 - 2005 where he shows unforgettable images of electronic waste such as millions swirling cellphones. His In Katrina’s Wake Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster is another breathtaking and masterful depiction of the devastation wrought from Katrina. Be sure to also read his statement on “In Katrina’s Wake” in his statement section.
His website is set up in such a way so you can’t link to a page directly but all is worth seeing. Prepare to spend some serious time really looking at these photographs. Chris Jordan’s work is the best by far I have seen addressing environmental issues
