Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan is an American artist and photographer – many of his pieces are created from photographs of garbage. Some of his work includes;

‘Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption‘ which was a series from 2003 to 2006, various large format photographs depicting the severity of America’s waste and consumption.

‘In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster‘ which was a series in 2005, a series of images depicting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

‘Running the Number I: An American Self Portrait‘ which was a series of photographic mosaics , visualisations of statistics to America’s
consumerisms, social issues and addictions.

‘Midway: Message from the Gyre‘ is one of his more recent series which took place from 2009 to 2013 where he photographed rotting carcasses of baby Albatrosses who were filled with plastic.

In ‘Midway: Message from the Gyre‘ the baby Albatross had been filled with plastic due to their parents mistakenly feeding their offspring with waste they had found floating in the ocean, mistaking it for food. This lead to the gruesome images such as the one above, however in 2012 Chris funded a Kickstarter which gained over $100,000 of donations after he began to create a documentary project. There had been little activity regarding the project – since 2014, although it started to be “in progress” in 2016 and by 2017 it had been finished and being screened in select locations.

As I have previously stated, images like this might be quite morbid or gruesome, as such, however they truly do help people see just how much damage waste is doing to the environment. Series such as this help depict the severity of the waste – as yes, people are aware that animals consume the wastage that lies in the ocean and on the shorelines, however we never see it with our own eyes therefore it is almost “out of sight, out of mind” which is truly upsetting.

People also fail to see how quickly we are killing our own planet. Some people have the mindset of “I won’t be alive, so I don’t care what happens to it” a very toxic and sad mindset to have, but there are still a large portion of the population who want to help save out planet and the life living upon it – we still can save it, there is still time to try and reduce the amount of waste that is not only produced, but dumped in the ocean.

To put it in perspective;

In 1950s – the world’s population of 2.5 billion produced 1.5 million tons of plastic. Then in 2016, the world’s population of 7 billion people produced over 320 million tons of plastic. This is set to double by 2034.

There may be around 5.25 trillion macro and microplastics in the open ocean – weighing up to 269’000 tons.

Over 100’000 marine mammals and turtles, and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution every year.

Over 150 plastic bottles litter each mile of UK beaches and approximately 5,000 items of marine plastic pollution have been found per mile of the beaches in the UK.

This is just a few of the many, many statistics about pollution. When people often think about the consequences of pollution, they think a couple hundred years – when in reality it is quite the contrary, it could be as close as 2034 – 2050 and some people still remain unnerved by this.