My discovery coincided with the announcement of the winner of the Prix Pictet, a new global prize celebrating the work of both professional and amateur photographers. Awarded last week in Paris, the Prix Pictet is the first competition of its type to focus on the global issue of sustainability—this year in particular, on water. The winner of 100,000 Swiss francs ($86,000) is the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquim whose photos of the desertification of China are truly disturbing.
Strange other-worldly landscape reflecting the dryness of spirit at the core of China...
But this entry is about Chris Jordan, an American photographer whose series of photos of post-Katrina waste were also entered into the competition. He was on the short list along with 16 others, but there was only one prize. He calls his series, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster and his artist's statement reads like an indictment.
There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane season’s extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices.
Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form, like the sun’s rays narrowed through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in the Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible in some degree. The hurricane’s damage has been further amplified by other human causes, including failures of preparedness and response on many levels; existing poverty conditions; levee problems that were mired in political maneuverings; poor environmental and wetlands practices that left some areas more vulnerable; and the conspicuous absence of federal resources that were already being used in the Bush Administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Isn't this an incredibly sad, poignant photo? Like someone strung up.
Waste
Waste has been his main theme and he finds it everywhere.
Mixed Recycling, Seattle.
In 2003 he started taking pictures around shipyards and waste stations drawn in by the scale and strange beauty of the collected detritus of our voracious consumer society. "The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful." What he says is true. The piles of sorted waste—cell phones, bottles, canisters, cars—make puzzling viewing.
Circuit Boards, Atlanta.
The series, 2003-2005, is called Intolerable Beauty.
"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."
And so his work becomes a cause, a moral undertaking; his photos a revelation. What we toss comes back to haunt us—on the gulf stream, on the tide. There's no getting away from the vast emptiness we try to fill—admonished by our president even to buy more, drill more, manufacture more. It is painful to see, astonishing, and certainly intolerable.
E Waste, New Orleans
But here's what's hopeful: the waste, our waste (own it!), is sorted, organized, contained. That's partly what is astonishing—and charming, in a twisted way— in these pictures, the arrangements are aesthetic. And isn't creating order out of chaos the first step towards knowing what to do with it? I'm going to believe in the reality of these pictures, the excess, and in the possibility of reduction as well as transformation—and I don't mean turning trash into art. I'm going to continue to believe in the power of art to reveal and to make connections. Buy first, pay later. It's time. It is very obviously time to pay up.
Crushed Cars, Tacoma.
Chris Jordan didn't win the prize, but he takes the cake.
Container Yard #1, Seattle
