What if the way we talk about climate change is making everything worse?
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Chris Jordan is a photographer and artist, best known for his projects that probe the dark underbelly of our culture of mass consumption. For many years, he has been interested in the tragedies and ironic complexities of our many forms of waste. His work has tried to edge-walk the lines between art and activism, beauty and horror, abstraction and representation, and the visible and the invisible. It feels worth it to me to face the external landscapes of the shadow side of our culture, as a way of encountering something internally about ourselves that is otherwise hard to see. His approach is less about blaming or judging, and more about honoring the complexity of these phenomena. Series made with these intentions include “Intolerable Beauty,” “Running the Numbers,” “Midway,” and “In Katrina’s Wake.” The arc of this work culminated in his film “Albatross” (2018), about birds on a remote island in the Pacific whose bodies are filled with plastic. His newer projects turn in a radically different direction: toward the transformative power of beauty. Chris has come to believe in beauty as a kind of energetic medicine to heal individual and collective trauma and remind us about what matters on a basic level. In the increasing insanity and mental chaos of our world, Chris sees the celebration of beauty not as a form of avoidance or denial, but as a compass that points back toward connection with essential parts of ourselves.
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