My friend Dennis just passed the work of Chris Jordan my way. Shocking. In case you’re in need of another reason to think critically about our society’s consumption habits (as if you haven’t seen enough already) check his website.
After looking through his work I had to be still for a while. I can’t remember a series of photographs that has made me feel simultaneously enthralled / heartbroken / pessimistic / pissed off. Apparently it’s that way for a reason. “I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination,” Jordan says. “The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.”
“These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
“To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.” – Chris Jordan, October 2009
