Mass Consumption and the Environment: An Interview with Photographer Chris Jordan

In an era of mass consumption, photographer Chris Jordan’s work carries many messages, from social to environmental. Stuck as a corporate lawyer, Jordan was in search of more fulfilling work when he took a simple photograph of garbage. Activist friends told him the photo “had relevance” and soon Jordan was pushed in a direction of documenting consumption and social habits in a moving way. Several years ago he produced his famous series Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption, taking a look at the true scale of our consumption. Now, his latest series, Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait, turns statistics into visuals, showing us what the real impact of 6.7 billion people on earth looks like. The series includes several pieces that carry an environmental message, like Gyre, which draws from the famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, and depicts the 2.4 million pieces of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre.

Although he doesn’t consider himself an environmental artist, Jordan’s photographs force us to consider the environmental effects of our everyday habits, from over fishing to recycling. Normally these effects are all found in the form of statistics, and although numbers might be eye-popping, Jordan believes that for us to make change, we have to be able to visualize them. “[There are] gigantic statistics and the numbers are so big that it has no meaning, so it’s difficult for us to relate to these phenomena [bottles we throw away, etc.]… so what I think tends to happen is that there’s a disconnect,” says Jordan.

Jordan breaches that disconnect by producing work that puts the viewer up close with the issue at hand. “We can read all day about scientific data, but if we don’t feel anything about the scientific data it won’t affect us… we don’t make changes in our behavior unless we feel something,” says Jordan.

With his large scale photography, Gyre, for example, is 8×11 feet, Jordan’s work can be intimidating. “People feel overwhelmed,” says Jordan. But that’s because the scale of what he is trying to portray is usually enormous in and of itself. “If I do a piece to represent 2 trillion pounds of coal, how big will that be?”

Despite the popularity of his work, Jordan’s role as an artist and an activist is neither glamorous, nor sexy; his work forces people to deal with reality, something that isn’t always beautiful. “[It’s like being] at a party where everyone is drinking wine and chatting, I’m the guy that says ‘hey anybody seen the bloody rhino head in the corner?’”

On a personal level, Jordan is driven by the large scale of the issues he covers, and he fully understands how uncomfortable they can make people feel. “I do feel overwhelmed by a lot of these issues, not only by my own work, but as I research these issues, watch documentaries, and talk to activists… the more I’m overwhelmed. It’s traumatizing to really show up in the world and take part.”

Ultimately, Jordan hopes that more people being to take part in their world, pushing for change. “My naïve hope is that if we all start acting in a conscious way we might be able to start choosing what we want for our future, instead of just arriving at our future and arriving at a catastrophe… and live in a world different than the one we live in now. There are millions of other people that feel this. That’s what the green movement is… it’s about all getting together and deciding the future we want.”

You can buy a copy of Chris Jordan’s book Running the Numbers : An American Self Portrait on his website.