detail of Cans Seurat, 2007, 60x92"
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.
Chris Jordan is a photographer based in Seattle who's work has been influenced by photographers like Andreas Gursky. Jordan has definitely influenced my own work, as I was looking at him when I did my Darfur installation. All three of the series featured on his website are amazing, but he regrets that they are not nearly as impactful on the web as in person.
His earlier work is all photographed from existing found scenes- as is- pictured in his Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption. His newest work Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait (2006-2007) features digitally compiled photographs based on statistics of American (and world-wide) litter and consumption. He describes how he had one litter research organization send him 5,000 cigarettes which he dumped out on the floor, photographed, and digitally manipulated to create a massive image of the number of cigarettes discarded in one second all around the world.
I listened to a podcast interview with him and was intrigued to find out that his original interest was not consumerism, but color. He would find scenes like old paint cans in the dumpster in the back of an auto body shop and photograph them for the amazing color they produced. One particular image of a mass amount of trash he took and blew up spurred his interest in photographing things related to mass consumption. I think it's amazing how he could come from almost a strictly formal photographic curiosity, and end up doing something so heavily conscience driven.
http://www.chrisjordan.com/
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