Intolerable beauty

Chris Jordan, Circuit Boards #2, New Orleans 2005

A very worthwhile story on Bill Moyers Journal yesterday about photographic artist Chris Jordan. From the accompanying page on the Moyers site:

Former corporate attorney turned photographic artist, Chris Jordan explains that he never used to be focused upon making a social statement with his work. "All I was interested in about photography was aesthetic beauty...places where color appears inadvertently."

Yet after photographing a large pile of garbage that he deemed "really beautiful," friends began to point him toward the social repercussions inherent in his work regarding waste and American consumerism. "It's something that I truly cannot take credit for, is finding my way to consumerism as my subject. Because it found me."
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Jordan's latest project, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, seeks to make tangible statistics about our country's consumption that involve such large numbers that they are difficult to fully fathom on the page. "Our minds are just not wired to be able to really comprehend and make meaning of, and feel, numbers that are that huge," Jordan explains. "I think there's this worldwide cultural craving for a more sensible approach to our consumption."
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Size plays an important part in the new series, with certain pictures over 10 feet high and 25 feet wide. "I want people to realize that they matter," Jordan describes. "As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us."

More on story and interview video here.