Chris Jordan II

Chris Jordan has now entered into the arena of my hero's, they are a select and precious few. This is his Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" created from tones of plastic retrieved from the Pacific ocean.
To be exact 2.4 million pieces of plastic, as that is the estimated pounds of plastic that enter the worlds oceans every hour.
Strange how I was dwelling on this island of human detritus just the other day and how it is madness that it is not being dredged up and recycled or disposed of in a less random/damaging way.
Chris has done a TED talk and this latest project has been written about on Inhabitat.

Fag Friday 2 (Chris Jordan Fag Butts)

More of Chris Jordan's amazing photographs this one is Fag Butts.
''I decided to do the ugliest picture I could think of: an image of 125,000 cigarette butts. That’s the number that are littered around the world every second. I got 5,000 cigarette butts and I photographed them over and over, stirring them around, until I had an image of 125,000 cigarette butts. My intention was that it would be this disgusting, extremely edgy image. I hung it in my show and everybody flocked to that image and they were talking about how beautiful it was.''
http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Photography by Chris Jordan

Above Mobile Phones Atlanta 2005

Above: Crushed cars Tacoma 2004

Above: Computer Waste New Orleans 2005
Below: 32000 Barbies to illustrate the number of breast augmentation operations in the US every month.

Chris Jordan is a photographer who portrays global culture and mass consumption in a way that at first beguiles and then shocks.

I first became aware of him through a central spread in the Guardian, with a shocking picture of disposed Mobile phones, part of a series called 'Intolerable Beauty'.

Chris's work has intolerable beauty, it is truly shocking and horrifying, please spend some time and have a good look.

His work is like the 'big lie theory', only the 'Big Lie Theory' has now become 'the big statistic theory' in that the 'big statistic' is beyond our grasp of reality, it is not comprehendable and thus we accept and dismiss it, as not applicable to us or our actions.

Chris Jordan tries to make the statistics visable, understandable and something to do with you, me, us.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

And yes TED has found another wonder.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html