Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan’s combined passions for conservation, activism, and photography have made him one of the “it” artists of the green movement. Jordan is best known for his large photographs depicting the consumerism, waste, and decay of American society. The artist was raised in Connecticut before attending law school and working as a corporate lawyer for ten years, later resigning to pursue his photography full time.
Jordan’s work, while often uncomfortable and unsettling for the viewer, stands as a bold testimony to the future consequences of the American tradition of mass consumption and waste. In regards to the politically charged statements behind his photographs, Jordan comments that in the beginning, “All I was interested in about photography was aesthetic beauty…places where color appears inadvertently…It’s something that I truly cannot take credit for, finding my way to consumerism as my subject. Because it found me.” His first several collections of works, Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003-2006) and In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (2005) were met with critical acclaim and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the Lannan Foundation Gallery, Santa Fe, in 2006. Since then, Jordan has had solo exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2009) and the Austin Museum of Art, Texas (2010), among others.
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has an upcoming exhibition titled Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers, scheduled to be on view from October 26 to November 20, 2012. The artist currently resides in Seattle, Washington.