Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life—a making
large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our
stuff.
Photographer Chris Jordan trains his eye on American consumption. His
2003-05 series “Intolerable Beauty” examines the hypnotic allure of the
sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day: cliffs of baled
scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of
mass-produced goods.
His 2005 book In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural
Disaster is a chilling, unflinching look at the toll of the storm. And
his latest series of photographs, “Running the Numbers,” gives dramatic
life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like “We use 2
million plastic bottles every 5 minutes” become a chilling sea of
plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.
In April 2008, Jordan traveled around the world with National Geographic as an international eco-ambassador for Earth Day 2008.
“As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made
up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there
somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who
needs to change. It’s each one of us.”
-Chris Jordan on Bill Moyers Journal