hris Jordan is a corporate lawyer turned photographic artist based in Seattle, Washington. He is best known and has been called “the ‘it’ artist of the green movement” for his large scale works depicting the detritus of mass culture, from images of mountains of garbage to his digitally-manipulated photographs depicting hundreds of thousands of cell phones, aluminium cans, plastic bottles and the like. His project, Midway: Message from the Gyre (2009-ongoing) presents photographs of albatross chicks made in 2009-2010 on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. 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. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, as stated by the artist, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. This project has expanded in scope as the metaphor of Midway continued to unfold. Chris’ team has returned to Midway in July and September 2010, and again in the spring, to photograph and film the effects of plastic pollution on the lifecycle of the albatross at several different stages. A blog was born to document the experience and a documentary film is in the works.
Jordan’s web page
