Photographing America's Garbage: Q&A with Chris Jordan

"Shark Teeth" (Courtesy Chris Jordan Photographic Arts)

Close-up of "Shark Teeth"

After 10 years as a corporate lawyer, artist Chris Jordan quit his job to photograph trash. Starting at garbage dumps and harbors near his Seattle home, Jordan quickly became overwhelmed with the sheer scale of America's collective consumerism. He has since zoomed his lens out, tackling consumer waste by the numbers in a groundbreaking digital format that combines thousands of individual photos to create a harrowing image of the American way of life. His newest collection includes a 64" x 94" mural(above) of 270,000 shark teeth, one for each shark killed for their fins on a daily basis. Another shows 28,000 42-gallon drum barrels, showing the exact amount of oil consumed in the US every two minutes.

Jordan's artistic vision has gained attention from political and social leaders worldwide. He presented his work at the 2007 TED conference, and has been featured in some of the nation's leading publications. In interviews on The Colbert Report and The Rachael Ray Show, Jordan attempted to awaken the American consciousness. "It's not that we don't know what to do, we just don't have the political will to do it," he says. "The call to action that I make with my work is trying to bring my viewer to a halt and feel something."

Chris Jordan recently spoke with us to explain his vision for a leaner, greener America.

Coming from the corporate world, why did you feel it was important to shed light on global consumerism?
It was an issue that I woke up to in a kind of fortuitous way. When I first started taking photographs of consumption, I didn’t care about that stuff. I had no interest in mass consumption. The first time I photographed garbage, I did it because it was beautiful. It was other people who said that it was a macabre picture of America. As I started exploring consumerism, it was like waking up from the matrix. I realized that this huge issue was not only affecting my own life as a materialistic American, but I saw this all around me.

Why did you choose to work in this medium?
It started back when I was taking straight photographs. As I got toward the end of the Intolerable Beauty series, I hadn’t really portrayed the extent of our mass consumption at all. The piles of garbage that I photographed in Seattle were just part of one day’s consumption of just Seattle’s garbage. I started to realize that it’s an invisible problem. It never comes all into one place at one time. There’s nowhere that we can go and stand in front of all the oil that we burn in a day or see all the people that are imprisoned. The only way that we can see the extent of our consumption is to use digital media.

What impact do you hope your photographs have on those who see them?
We’re at a remarkable time in human history. With the advent of the internet, we now suddenly have access to this unprecedented amount of information that is very difficult for us to assimilate. The internet allows us to zoom way further in on a wide variety of issues. In the presence of this overwhelming amount of information that shows us the incomprehensible complexity of the world, I must discover how I, as an individual, can convince myself that I matter. How can one individual feel that they belong in such an enormous global community? That’s the question that I’m really trying to ask with my work. If we don’t feel that we belong, then we act like we don’t matter, and that’s the way we’ve been acting all these years. We just roam around and take whatever resources we want without regard to anyone around us. It explains to some extent the cultural paralysis that we’ve been stuck in in the last few years. Just a few years ago, people didn’t have to think about the global effect of their individual actions. When our parents wanted to buy a stereo the only two questions had to think about were "Do I want it?" and "Can I afford it?" Now, there’s a whole other set of questions that comes into play, like "Is this the responsible thing to do?" In order to think about it this way, we have to have this ability to simultaneously think about the individual and zoom back to think about the collective.

How do you see art today acting as a medium for change?
I think art is going to play a huge role. There’s one thing that art can do more than any other discipline: Art is about feeling. Science plays an incredibly important role in analyzing information, but if information is only given to us in scientific data, we’re losing feeling. When you put those things together, then I think there is the power to transform consciousness. That’s what I’m trying to do.

In your current collection, “Running the Numbers II,” you depict problems associated with the earth's oceans. Why did you find that important?
It’s incredibly frightening to me to see what’s happening to our oceans. Part of the power that the internet is that it has given us is the ability to comprehend how interconnected we are to each other and the environment. We depend for our lives on these vast networks of other people and our environment. The ocean can be said to be the single biggest thing that we depend on. Huge parts of that ecosystem are in danger of extinction. We’ve been hunting the apex predators like sharks and tuna to the brink of extinction. Half of the carbon sequestration is happening by the ocean absorbing CO₂, which makes the ocean acidic. It just about getting to the level that it will dissolve the plankton. If we lose our plankton, no one knows what will happen, but it could be the very end of life in our oceans.

takepart by learning more about Chris Jordan's work and visiting an exhibition near you.