Chris Jordan – photography of mass consumerism and its fallout

Chris Jordan – photography of mass consumerism and its fallout

Chris Jordan’s body of work concerns our mass consumerist culture and its distressing and tragic fallout. It’s difficult to look at Jordan’s works and not be affected by the themes that they present. His photographs are a sad indictment of consumerism and its impact on both human identity and the environment.

Most tragic of all are the images from his “Midway – Message from the Gyre” project. Here are photographs of decayed albatross chicks, discovered on an atoll in the Northern Gyre region of the North Pacific ocean. The dessicated carcasses of these chicks show the cause of their premature deaths:

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. (http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11)

We live in an “out of sight, out of mind” society, and Jordan’s  photographs from Midway remind us of what we have conveniently “forgotten”.

It’s a condemnation of our consumerist actions and its inevitable outcome in mass pollution — and none of us can escape blame. This is the natural world paying for our laziness, our greed, our obsession with quick-fix products, our “need” for plastic.

Jordan’s website – chris jordan photography .