In large-format color, these images take the viewer on a tour behind the façade of the American Dream into the underbelly of our consumer society, where the vast cumulative effects of our individual consumer choices are visible. These images invite viewers to consider the complexity and scale of the consumerism issue, and to evaluate their own role in the consumptive process.

Link: Chris Jordan Photography

Thumbnail image show above right:
Wall of Drums, Seattle 2003 (homage to Christo)    44x56"

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 kind of slow-motion apocalypse in progress. Thousands of used cars are piled in rows at a waterfront facility for shredding. A heap of sawdust larger than a football field rises over a Tacoma lumber mill like a tragically spectacular man-made mountain. The real Mount Rainier is half obscured behind a gray industrial horizon of shipping containers. And a frozen stampede of empty truck trailers awaits the next incoming container ship loaded with products to be carried onto our highways toward their destinations in our closets, cupboards and garages."

CIRCUIT BOARDS, ATLANTA 2004    44x64"


SAWDUST, TACOMA 2004    44x75"


"Seeing our consumption in its cumulative form raises profound questions for me on a visceral level. I am appalled by these scenes; yet another side of me is drawn in with an entrancing sense of awe and fascination. Beauty and desolation reside here together, woven into macabre and seductive juxtaposition. Our consumerism holds an anesthetizing kind of mob mentality; collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I long for a way to reconcile the passive abundance of the American lifestyle with my uncomfortable knowledge about its effects on our planet, and on our individual spirits."

CHASSIS YARD #2, TACOMA 2004    44x70"


CELL PHONES, ORLANDO 2004    44x82"


"As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we contemplate a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So perhaps my photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-reflection. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake."

BOXCAR, SEATTLE 2003    44x53"


Images used with permission of the artist