Chris Jordan

I picked a photographer by the name Chris Jordan. He uses items to invoke a message or awareness to his viewers. He works are manipulated or digitally altered photographs. He makes thousands and thousands of items such as plastic bottles, light bulbs, words, pills, etc to create something big that is a problem in society that we should address. He wants people to be aware of what they consume globally and how it affects the environment. I believe his focus lately is the pollution in the ocean, but he also photographs other items that are problematic within society such as prescription drugs or the war in Iraq. He also bring an artist style to his photographs using composition from other artist such as Hiroshige or using his own mosaic style.  In his books “Running with Numbers I and II”, Jordan uses statistic in a visual manner to produce an artistic image. The small images are a mosaic that will depict something about society’s values or careless exploitation. Many of his composition are large and some appear to go into space with his layers of thousands of small items such as his work of light bulbs. Set in a black background lightbulbs (that are lit) spread out through the darkness into this large white light in the middle of the composition. The foreground has large lightbulbs that recede into smaller ones until they reach the middle of the perspective. “Barbie Dolls” displays the number women getting breast implants. The nude Barbies are arranged in a circle pattern like a snowflake to form a woman’s upper torso particularly the breast. From afar, it looks like Seurat’s pointillism, but the Barbie’s are arranged by each other from head to toe in this photomontage. It represents 32000 women who obtained breast augmentation for the year 2006. 

Another picture Jordan altered that impacted me as a viewer (because of mandatory community service in an animal shelter) was “Dog and Cat Collars” for 2009. It depicts two famous cartoon comic characters Charlie Brown and his dog Snoopy embracing. Like the photograph Barbie Dolls, a close up of the image shows ten thousand white and black collars from both cats and dogs. Ten thousand collars was the average number of unwanted pets euthanized for 2009. The white collars are arranged for the background while the black collars form the outline of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and Snoopy cloud of loving thoughts for his master.

 Jordan also adapted the Japanese woodprint of Hiroshige “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”. In Jordan version of the famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, he uses plastic found from the Pacific Ocean instead of traditional paint. Jordan adds large colored plastic below the tip of the great wave to emphasize the medium as plastic garbage. It gives the photograph a meaning of horror to the viewer of how much waste especially plastic consumers put into the ocean from storm runoff.