Chris Jordan
PopTech 2009
Chris Jordan attended law school “for all the wrong reasons” and then spent ten years working as a lawyer, spending all of his free time and money on photography. After ten years, he quit the law practice to become a full-time photographer, and is now best known for striking large-scale works depicting consumerism and its aftermath.
Among Jordan’s shows are Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption; and Running The Numbers; which graphically depicted statistics related to U.S. consumption patterns. Traveling from shipping ports to industrial yards to garbage dumps, anywhere where the accumulated detritus of mass consumption is exposed to view, Jordan sees “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.”
His show In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, featured photographs taken in New Orleans in November and December of 2005, and highlighted the man made aspects of a disaster in which nearly 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned.