The Weight of Our Waste

Chris Jordan is an artist who uses photography to explore themes such as garbage, overconsumption, and our relationship with waste. His artwork Whale, 2011, depicts what initially appears to be a blurry image of a whale. However, as you look closer, you begin to realize that the seemingly unintelligible specks are actually thousands of individual plastic bags. By combining these small pieces of waste into one large image, Jordan creates a powerful visual representation of the impact of human consumption on the environment.

“Whale” is constructed from images of 50,000 plastic bags, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world’s oceans. (Jordan, 2011)

“Each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview... As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. . . . these are numbers that our brain just doesn’t have the ability to comprehend. (Jordan, 2011) 

We can’t make meaning out of these enormous statistics. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. (Jordan, 2011)

Jordan’s work is very important because it speaks to the human difficulty of comprehending the enormous amount of waste we produce. We can hear facts like “50,000 pieces of plastic are estimated to be floating in every square mile of the ocean,” but statistics like this can be difficult to imagine. Jordan’s ability to make us zoom in and out of the image allows us to see both the sea life being impacted and the individual plastic bags that make up the larger artwork. This perspective is impactful because it shows how our everyday choices and lack of proper recycling can have consequences for the living things around us.

References

Jordan, C. (n.d.). Whale. Chris Jordan Photographic Arts. https://www.chrisjordan.com/Running-the-Numbers/11/thumbs

Chris Jordan. (n.d.). Art Works for Change. https://www.artworksforchange.org/portfolio/chris-jordan/