Found this website – maybe on Boing Boing? – that shows albatross chicks who die because their mama birds bring them plastic for dinner. This is a pretty graphic indictment of our disregard for the environment, I think. Apparently, the photos were taken on an island located 2,000 miles from any continent in the north Pacific Ocean.
From Chris Jordan’s artist statement:
Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.
As I was writing this post, I realized Jordan was responsible for those photographs that my students were so excited about a couple years ago – ones where the image is composed of many mulitples of things to depict the excesses of our lifestyles.
Packing Peanuts, 2009 (60×80″) Depicts 166,000 packing peanuts, equal to the number of overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S. every hour.
