North Carolina Museum of Art - Outreach Exhibitions

the BIG picture interactive exhibition project

Archive of artist profiles

Chris Jordan
American, born 1963

The immense scale and close-up perspective of Chris Jordan’s vividly colored photographs turns the waste and refuse of contemporary society into abstract compositions of pattern, light, and color with a stunning clarity and impressive level of detail. The sheer accumulation of trash depicted in his photographs—thousands of cell phones, mountains of cigarette butts, tons of broken glass—is simultaneously bleakly overwhelming and breathtakingly beautiful. His monumental images of society’s castoffs bring the viewer face to face with contemporary consumption, industrial waste, and the resulting environmental consequences. The statistics behind Jordan’s images, such as Cell Phones, Orlando (right and at bottom of page) and Cigarette Butts (below), are astonishing-- at electronics recycling centers alone, 130 million cell phones are discarded every year; in the United States, it is estimated that 126,000 cigarette butts are thrown away each second.

Chris Jordan, Cell Phones, Orlando (detail), 2004, ink-jet print, laminated and mounted on Plexiglas, 44 x 82 in., Collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr., © 2004 Chris Jordan, Courtesy Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

At left: Chris Jordan, Cigarette Buttes (detail)

Below: Chris Jordan, Cigarette Butts, 2005, Ink jet print, laminated and mounted on plexiglass, 44 x 88 in., Collection of Allen G. Thomas, Jr.,© 2005 Chris Jordan, Courtesy Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

The four photographs featured in The BIG Picture exhibition are from Jordan’s 2003-2005 series, Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption. Jordan offers an alternate view of the American landscape—the one seen from salvage yards, scrap heaps, recycling centers, and dumps. As he has stated, “My hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. 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.”

Jordan shoots with an 8x10 view camera, scans the film into Photoshop and makes his own prints, using an inkjet printer with archival inks. The disorienting perspective of his photographs makes it hard to judge scale and size with images that completely cover the field of vision and seem to extend beyond the picture frame. In Glass, Seattle, (left) the viewer’s first impression is of an all over pattern of color and light, a shimmering carpet of green, brown, yellow, and red. After a moment, the recognizable forms of individual bottles and shards of glass come into focus and one realizes that what one is actually looking at is a staggering amount of broken glass. The photograph titled, Sand & Gravel Yard, New Orleans, (below) appears to be a craggy, mountainous Western landscape, like the red rock formations found in Utah or Arizona, but, in fact, it is just an ordinary

pile of sand and gravel that has been eroded, sculpted and shaped by the rain and wind into starkly beautiful and dramatic forms.

Sand & Gravel Yard, New Orleans, 2005, Ink-jet print, laminated and mounted on Plexiglas, Gift of Allen G. Thomas Jr. in memory of Thomas J. Farris, 2007 (2007.4.1), © 2005 Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan lives and works in Seattle, Washington. After spending ten years as a corporate lawyer, Jordan quit his job in 2002 in order to pursue photography full-time. His work has been shown in numerous museums and galleries, most recently in solo exhibitions at Von Lintel Gallery, New York (forthcoming in June 2007); Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (2006, 2005); Lannan Foundation Gallery, Santa Fe (2006); Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2005); Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle (2005); and in group exhibitions, including “Altered States,” Tufts University Art Gallery, Boston, 2007; “Envisioning Change,” Palace of Fine Arts, Brussels, 2007; “Weather Report,” Boulder Museum of Art, Boulder, CO, 2007; “Trace, Visions of Katrina,” Houston Center for Photography, Houston and New Orleans Museum of Art, 2006; and “Intimate Landscapes,” Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, 2000. His work has been reviewed in several publications, including San Francisco Chronicle (2006); Los Angeles Times (2006); Seattle Times (2006); Art in America (2005); The New York Times (2005); and Smithsonian Magazine (2005). In 2006, Princeton Architectural Press published a book of Jordan’s photographs from New Orleans, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Wilson Center for Photography, London.

Visit Chris Jordan's Web site.

Podcast
Listen to a conversation with Chris Jordan and curator Linda Dougherty.

Interactive Q&A
Ask the artist a question.
Read all posted questions and answers.

Chris Jordan, Cell Phones, Orlando, 2004, ink-jet print, laminated and mounted on Plexiglas, 44 x 82 in., Collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr., © 2004 Chris Jordan, Courtesy Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles