I am simultaneously entranced, impressed and saddened by Chris Jordan’s Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of Mass Consumption.

Crushed Cars:

I rarely post an entire artist statement, but he expresses himself so eloquently that I feel these poignant words should be shared:

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.

Circuit Boards:

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive 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 fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

Cell Phones:

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on 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 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.

There are surprising splashes of color in the midst of decay.

Sometimes the waste is so staggering that items become visually decontextualized and surreal. Cigarette butts, spent bullet casings and diodes in mass quantities morph into generic patterned backgrounds. The title draws you back into the grim reality of what you are actually looking at.

Jordan’s work showcases the most thought provoking ruins of human decadence, the interplay of mass production and environment, areas both saturated with and devoid of humanity.

I highly encourage you to explore the rest of this photo set AND the post-hurricane Katrina set on his website.