Chris Jordan is a artist/ photographer born 1963 who is based in Seattle. Many of Jordan's works are created from photographs of waste and mass consumption. His focus on these subjects started when he was once visiting an industrial yard trying to look for interesting patterns of colour and order. Also his industrious passion for conservation and awareness has brought much attention to his photography in recent years. His work is always heavily impacting and quite obvious in its point, but he still leaves it up to the viewer to make their own mind about the inevitable consequences which will arise from our consumption and waste habits, like I have previously talked about.
The series of his that I will be focusing on is titled, 'Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption' even by just reading the title one can see that it connects really well to my own project. Jordan for this project toured around America's shipping ports and industrial yards to view the accumulated objects of our consumption problem. He comments "the immense scale of out consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity." He goes onto mention how our consumerism and waste is like a mob mentality, we are all indulging in the act but we are each anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. This is part of the problem why we get these places that just amount such high levels of waste and discarded objects, and why I believe that someone like myself should photograph it to highlight it back to the publics attention. He states "My hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a king of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake."
In all Chris Jordan is perfect inspiration for my project because he has done his series for exactly the same reason as me, to produce images that capture the huge scale and problem we have with our own consumption, for it then to be shown to the public and their mentality hopefully changed.
