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| © Chris Jordan |
| Jordan photographed this piece, "Crushed Cars," at a facility in Tacoma, WA, where he found 130,000 tons of cars waiting to be shredded and shipped to China. He used a large-format view camera and sheet film (technical details not available). |
What's worth photographing? Where can you find beauty, or meaning? Just about anywhere -- even in the trash bin. Here are three different visions of how refuse can be embraced.
Chris Jordan (www.chrisjordan.com), found his future in a pile of garbage.
Jordan, now 44 and living in Seattle, is a former attorney who's loved photography since early in law school. But he didn't work up the courage to pursue it full-time until he faced the prospect of marking a major birthday sitting in a corporate law office.
"As I approached 40, a new fear surfaced -- the fear of not having lived my life," he says.
So he quit his job and set out as a photographer, bringing with him a nest egg he hoped would last two years to get established as an artist. He was interested in beautiful images, working with an 8x10 view camera and developing his own theory of color aesthetics.
Then one day Jordan photographed a garbage heap. He was attracted to the colors, finding them an unlikely demonstration of his theories. He made a huge print, hung it in his studio and invited a couple of photographer friends over to see it. The friends "started talking about consumerism," he recalls. "It was annoying to me because I wanted to talk about my color theory."
Eventually, though, the idea of the waste of consumer society -- the glut of trash, electronics, packaging and the rest discarded daily -- broke through. Jordan was fascinated, and horrified. The discovery "was like waking up from The Matrix. I discovered this really important issue. It's just this shock."
And his future course of photography was set.
Jordan still strived for beauty, but now it was as a means, not an end. He studied photographers such as Richard Misrach, whose beautiful photos depict the often-ugly effects of humans on the landscape, showing the impact of practice-bombing in the desert or waste dumped into the Mississippi River. Jordan thought the same concept would apply to consumer waste. "Beauty can be a very important tool for drawing the viewer into the conversation," he says.
Shooting on location (in later photos, in the studio), Jordan would create a pretty image of, say, vast numbers of discarded cell phones, giving them a pretty swirl to evoke a galaxy.
But, concerned that his photos were so attractive that people would ignore the message, Jordan set out to create "the ugliest photo I could ever make." His subject? Exactly 125,000 cigarette butts, the number discarded around the world every second. He made the image by photographing 5,000 cigarettes over and over again, combining the digital images and printing the result at a huge 5x10 feet. Viewed up close, the fine detail can be disgusting, says Jordan. "You can see the lipstick on a butt."
Still, when these less-pretty images were first shown in New York and elsewhere, "it turns out that they were by far the most popular images in the series," he adds.
For Jordan that was a revelation. He plans to keep working along similar lines, shooting the discards of the consumer world and bringing life to statistics -- for example, the 426,000 cell phones discarded in the U.S. daily -- that might otherwise be too dry to have an impact.
While these images may be beautiful, they won't be pretty, he says. "My idea of what is beauty has changed a lot."
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