Chris Jordan

Photographic artist, Seattle, Washington, USA

Chris Jordan is a photographic artist based in Seattle, Washington, USA. His work explores the detritus of contemporary mass culture, from photographs of mountains of garbage to photo-based conceptual works that visually connect to the viewer to otherwise abstract statistics associated with the things we waste. In his Running The Numbers series, millions of plastic bottles become an ocean, an ocean of plastic pollution becomes a tsunami, and so on.

Jordan’s work has been exhibited around the world in solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California, and at the Passage de Retz in Paris, France, where he was awarded the 2011 Prix Pictet Commission Prize. In 2010 he received the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography, and in 2007 he participated in the Envisioning Change exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, where he was presented with a Green Leaf Award.

Jordan’s work has been featured in magazines, newspapers, blogs, and documentary films around the world, and he has published three books: Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2005), In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (2006), and most recently, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait (2009). His large-scale prints are held in public and private art collections around the globe.