Chris Jordan’s provocatively manipulated digital photographs tell a striking story of human consumption and degradation.
Did you ever wonder how many plastic beverage bottles Americans use, and what they would look like if you could see them all at once? Jordan, a Seattle-based photographer, did wonder, and his “Running the Numbers” project is the result. Besides showing the two million plastic bottles that the artist says Americans use every five minutes, his photographs (http://www.chrisjordan.com) use images of toothpicks to depict the number of trees cut down each year for junk mail, Barbie dolls to show the breast-enhancement surgeries performed each month, dog and cat collars to show the number of animals euthanized every day, and fragments of plastic garbage to show the pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour.
“People get angry because they have an emotional reaction to the work,” Jordan says, “and that’s the point—to translate these incomprehensible statistics into a visual language that allows us to feel something.”
The process starts when Jordan comes across a horrendous statistic. After pinning down the numbers, he looks for images or objects that will best tell the statistical story. For his photograph showing the 32,000 elective breast surgeries performed in the United States each month in 2006, he decided to arrange 53 Barbie dolls in floret patterns (think Busby Berkeley meets Photoshop), repeated digitally until he reached his number.
“Gyre,” an 8- by 11-foot piece inspired by “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” by the Japanese artist Hokusai, depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, which Jordan says is equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. Zoom in closely, and what appear to be mosaic fragments or Seurat-like touches of color are bits of plastic bottles, combs, and other trash that Jordan says were actually pulled from the Pacific by a scientist working on an environmental project. If Hokusai’s print shows the power of nature and the fragility of man, Jordan’s work may show the reverse. The wave is crashing in more ways than one.
Jordan, 46, is a former insurance lawyer (“I was basically a walking dead person”) who turned his photographic hobby into his passion about seven years ago. He has published a book of photographs from the “Running the Numbers” project, and continues to add new images on the same theme. Haverford College and Boston’s Museum of Science have recently shown his work, which will travel this year to other campuses, including the College of Charleston and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Another recent project, which Jordan shot on the Midway Atoll, in the Pacific, depicts the carcasses of baby albatrosses that died after consuming plastic detritus that the birds’ parents had mistakenly brought them as food. The photos are haunting still lifes: the colorful contents of the baby birds’ stomachs are left intact, just as he found them. “I think humanity is in a Midway place right now,” he says. “The symbolism of those birds filled up with plastic—that’s us. That’s American culture, spread out on the ground in this grotesquely beautiful way.”
The environmental movement, Jordan says, puts out the message that everybody matters—that a single individual can change the world. “But there’s a shadow side to that that’s not being addressed right now—the feeling that I don’t matter, that I’m an anonymous pixel in an incomprehensible world.”
“That, to me, is the central paradox of our times.”