When you stand back at a distance, our consumerism doesn’t look so bad,” Chris Jordan says. “In fact, it looks pretty good. We get all these cool, beautiful things—snazzy cell phones, new BMWs, and much more. But when you walk up close and look at the details, when you zoom all the way in, it looks like something very different.”
Fine art photographer Chris Jordan is rapidly capturing the attention of the art world and beyond by focusing his lens on consumerism in a unique and discomforting way. Currently exhibiting in both New York and Los Angeles, one enormous five-by-ten-foot print appears from a distance as if it might only be many points of interesting color. Walk closer and you begin to see what appear to be tiny plastic bottles. Up close, you see that they are indeed plastic bottles, and at actual size. The enormity of the print is used to portray two million of these containers—the number consumed and discarded by Americans every five minutes.
Nearby, you might notice another of these titanic prints containing what appear to be thousands of black dots. Coming closer, you see that the mass is composed of tiny oblong objects. But move up close enough to touch it and you’ll see that it is a photograph of 426,000 cell phones—the number of cell phones retired daily.
It is a truly mind-boggling experience—for Jordan as well. He feels that if there is an evil within our society, it is our collective greed and desire for power. Chris doesn’t exclude himself from that category—he has been an avid consumer and continues to be so. But there is another side of himself, he says, that craves connection on a human level and experiences deep grief upon hearing of the environmental degradation occurring worldwide. “It’s a constant internal struggle,” he says. “And I think that’s the motivation behind my work—to raise the consciousness of that internal struggle in others so that people can make a more conscious choice for themselves.”
Does Jordan consider himself an activist? “Preaching never works,” he says. “I have learned that art can reach us on a kind of non-accusatory level that no amount of advocacy and preaching can do.”
One type of reaction Jordan sees very consistently in people who view his work is, This certainly can’t be caused by me. I just have one little cell phone, or I only dispose of a few plastic containers a week. “It’s very interesting, and I’m guilty of this myself,” he says. “Everybody blames it on somebody else—even our own president blames it on China.”
But this ubiquitous attitude may find its answer in the very device Jordan uses in his photography. “It’s hard to get our arms around the notion that each one of us is contributing an infinitesimal amount to the destruction of the world; but you just take that infinitesimal amount and you multiply it by hundreds of millions, and it turns out to be a catastrophic effect. One of the things that I want to try to convey with the really big prints is the sense of standing back and seeing the staggering many, and then walking up and being able to see the individual components. You see that each individual component is exactly the same size—each one contributes equally. And that’s what makes up the cumulative.”
Chris Jordan’s work is currently on exhibit at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York, at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, and on Chris Jordan’s website at www.chrisjordan.com. Check the website for upcoming exhibitions.
Comments on Individual Works
Cans Seurat, 2007
The reason I chose the Seurat painting (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886) as a model was, first, I wanted to make it a pointillist image with 106,000 aluminum cans (the number used in the U.S. every thirty seconds). I wanted the viewers to stand back from a distance and see one thing, and as they walked up closer see something else. Second, the original painting was done just at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, back at a time when taking your leisure in a park didn’t involve parking lots filled with SUVs and coolers of drinks and Frisbees and Nikes and boom boxes and all the stuff that’s associated now with taking our leisure in a park. It’s just a quiet, serene image of people being in a park together. I thought it would be an interesting image to play on that way.
Cell Phones, 2007
This one was made in a similar way to Plastic Bottles, 2007. I obtained about two hundred cell phones, all the same model—I wanted this one to be monochromatic and just have the number itself be the whole force of the image with no “interesting” composition or color to distract from the force of the number. I made a little frame in my studio that was about sixteen by twenty inches and took lots and lots and lots of pictures of the same bunch of cell phones and stirred them around each time in between. I slowly assembled this one gigantic image of 206,000 cell phones—one day’s worth of cell phone retirement. There’s a very interesting thing about cell phones: the vast majority of them aren’t recycled—the recycling rate is less than 2 percent. They just get put away in people’s drawers and boxes in their homes. It’s really hard to get people to relinquish them. That’s the whole challenge of the cell phone recycling business—they have the capacity to process ten times as many phones as they receive but they just don’t have the pipeline of phones coming in. They’re always trying to come up with new creative ways to get people to donate their cell phones.
Paper Bags, 2007
I made that whole image from a pile of a hundred paper bags, which was about a foot high on my studio table. I set up my camera looking at this little pile of paper bags and I took a picture, and then I took down the stack and restacked it into a different looking stack and took another picture. I did that for a few days until I had lots and lots of pictures of the same stack of bags, but each stack was configured a little bit differently. And then, keeping track of the number of duplications and the number of images I was using, I just started piling them on top of each other and creating this image of trees in a forest until I had 1.14 million bags, which was one hour’s worth of brown paper supermarket bags.
Plastic Bottles, 2007
This one depicts two million plastic bottles, which is the number of bottles we use in the United States every five minutes. I just got a few hundred bottles and put them in my driveway and took a picture of them. I then stirred them with a rake, took another picture, and repeated the process until I had hundreds and hundreds of separate photographs of the same bottles. Then I did the math to figure out how big the picture would have to be to show two million of them. That’s the staggering experience of doing this—the print had to be five by ten feet in size, and it had to contain five thousand individual photographs of four hundred bottles. I had to digitally stitch together this incredible number of individual images into one giant photograph.
