InvasiveThoughts.com

Eco-ambassador and National Geographic Photojournalist Chris Jordan grew up when the American Dream meant working to attain job security and material possessions. What Jordan asks of his audiences today is to reassess the notion of the American Dream; to reassess the notion that material possession means wealth because in the society in which we live, this type of wealth has a detrimental by-product called mass consumption. Yet mass consumption is often too vast for people to simply conceive.

The photographs that Jordan exhibits are of multiplied and magnified objects presented in such a way as to represent some very startling statistics on present-day consumption.

Included below is a transcription of Jordan's free lecture at the Municipal Auditorium on August 6^th, 2008. Several of the photographs included with the text are from his current exhibit, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, on display at the San Antonio Central Library through August 29th.

I want to tell you a story of how I came to this issue from the point of view of a very lost, angry, unfulfilled corporate lawyer, which I was…I went to UT Austin during the time I was in law school...I was seduced by the idea of good pay...I went in there to be a criminal defense lawyer... I was following what I was taught was the American Dream...you don't really dream about being fulfilled in your work...what you shoot for is job security...I couldn't figure out why I was not happy...I was just this angry guy…yet all this time, I was photographing but it was purely aesthetic, beautiful things...to me what photography was about was beauty, textures together...light...My mom was a watercolor painter, so I was interested in color...I was looking for this beautiful and very complex palate of color...that no one else noticed. So I would photograph [things like] the inside of dumpsters [because no one really saw the inside with the splattered trash]...

This led me to the industrial side of Seattle, but I had no interest in consumerism at the time...no interest in modern art...It was just about composition and color...I found this [shows slideshow picture of stacked and bound cardboard] in a recycling yard...I had some friends who walked up to this photograph and began talking about consumerism: "Hey, there's a wine cork! I wonder if this is from the bottle I drank. Chris, you made a piece of work that is plugged in to the real world for the first time.”

I began reading about consumerism...[I read] The Overspent American ... books talking about mass culture that were speaking directly to my life. American culture... We have made a gigantic mistake and that is to equate material wealth with happiness...It hit me that I wasn't seeing the scale of our mass consumption at all. I was seeing a small part of the mass consumption of one day in Seattle.

[Clicks on photo of black wires] This photo is a metaphor  — an organic earthy feel that when you get closer, you see are scrap wiring...a massive pile of cell phone wires trucked in...[Some wires not even unwrapped....all to be dumped in a landfill]... [There is] coltan, a mineral, in every single cell phone….mined in the Congo; and fights are breaking out over rights to coltan.

[Clicks on photo of phones] This photograph of the cell phones was taken in Atlanta...130 million phones discarded every year in America (2005 statistic).

I used an 8X10 camera to take [photographs of] giant piles of garbage...what I decided was to carry this thread further...I started playing my piano and meditating, and I thought “How can a photographer who can only capture visible things, capture this huge problem that is largely invisible?”

1.41 million brown bags consumed in an hour [clicks to slideshow photo]...The idea behind this work is to take these statistics...and no matter how badly we want to comprehend it, the mind cannot...we are at a place in our intellectual development that is still back in tribal numbers..."trillions" are starting to appear and that is such a giant and incomprehensible number. There is no way to feel about it...we are stuck with these dry, almost useless, incomprehensible numbers...1 million plastic cups (used every 6 hours on airline flights).

Who is it that is doing all this consuming? Is it all the people who work at Walmart? Is it all the people who live on the coasts and fly all around? Is it the people who drive SUVs? I think it is all of us equally. In order for us to change, we have to change equally...

2 million plastic beverages consumed every 5 minutes, 24-7, 365 days a year.When I was a kid, plastic bottles didn't even exist...this concept of carrying water everywhere we go [is new]...

I take photographs or download images from the Internet...It is extremely tedious... cutting and pasting images for weeks, listening to Herbie Hancock and drinking a glass of wine [audience laughs].

[Jordan clicks on an image of George Seurat's famous pointillism painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" that is actually a manipulated image of the 106,000 aluminum cans that are used every 30 seconds.]

The cans, I bought each type of off the shelf at a grocery store and photographed each one and cropped each one carefully to the same pixel dimension; and then I made a dark version of all of them and a light version of all of them. And then I used photo mosaic software. You start with a source you would like to create [like the Seurat painting]...and I had to do the math to figure out so that every pixel is one aluminum can. [The software then pulled from a] folder of 1500 images [to create the whole image].

[Aluminum] is strip-mined under Brazilian rain forests...[and then shipped to] Victoria, Texas and Iceland [for] refining...an enormous amount of power is used to [refine] aluminum cans...yet 50% of all aluminum cans in this country are not recycled...you could replace the entire airline fleet with the amount of aluminum cans we waste...and this is a precious resource...

Consumption is something we can slowly cut back. But there are 2.3 million Americans in prison right now...No other country has such a large percentage of its population in prison...not even China, [a country that has] 4 times [the people that America has]....So, I rented prison uniforms from a costume shop and piled them and photographed [them and made a digital image to show 2.3 million]

[Using the same technique as in the Seurat’s painting, I took] 200,000 packs of cigarettes [and represented them using] the famous painting by Van Gogh, Skeleton Skull Smoking a Cigarette...[We think about the 3,000 people who died on 911 and the effect of that on the nation, but then we think about the] 1,100 Americans who die of smoking cigarettes each day...

[And] breast augmentation surgery...women feel the need to implant implants in their breasts to feel more attractive...so I got a bunch of Barbie dolls at local thrift stores and I had a really macabre evening in my studio undressing these Barbie dolls [audience laughs]...32,000 Barbie dolls...The number of women who had augmentation surgery every month last year; and many were under the age of 21.

In Caracas, it is a tradition in South America [for girls to have] a coming out party at 15 years old; she is…introduced into society and puts on a big fiesta.[An old man I met] said "It used to be the party, and then it was the party or the trip to Europe, and then it was the party or the trip to Europe or the tits; and now they all get the tits."

There are these shops you can go to, to choose the implants, and they have them on the wall...and it is such a huge phenomenon...almost every family who can afford it does it...Here in Texas, it is the most popular graduation present for girls after high school.

Sharks are being massacred for their fins. ...the fishermen catch them, cut the fins off, and throw the sharks, alive, back in the water. The sharks lose the ability to spin [without their fins] and they turn belly up and drown...There are massive graves in the ocean...In China and Southeast Asia, they consume shark-fin soup. It is a status symbol...it is thought of as a symbol of affluence and prosperity...offered at weddings and business meetings.

China discouraged shark-fin soup during the Communist regime so as to not delineate between the wealthy and poor, but now it has become more accepted. [The] 270,000 sharks’ teeth, [represented in the picture], is the same number of sharks killed every single day for their fins...and yet, fins are the highest mercury-containing seafood product.

It takes a shark 8-14 years to reproduce....they are being harvested at a higher rate than they can reproduce... [Experts say] within 10- 20 years, sharks will be commercially extinct...the population is in collapse, and in danger of great extinction... [But the soup is] also causing brain damage and sterility... [Ironically, the best] advocates of sharks are surfers...surfers are most directly affected by them, but passionately advocate for them...

[It is about] the relationship between the individual and the collective. In Portuguese, there is a saying: What you do counts. Everything you do counts. The one thing in the world you can control is your own self. Is that argument persuasive? It is not. Because I am not changing. I still consume like crazy. It's a fraction: 1/6.6 billion. There are 6.6 billion people [on Earth]. Should I bother to unplug the modem? I fly into Los Angeles and see the kilowatts of energy that are wasted. And then I think, what does it matter? I have this deep core belief that I don't matter…I hear it inside myself, and it is powerful. And it is how I behave.

This is an incredibly difficult issue...we've been acting like we don't matter and the result is a catastrophe....so the question is, "How do we convince ourselves that we do matter?" I think maybe we need a new poet or musician or artist...I heard it said recently that artists would be our new cultural leaders...so this to me is the cutting edge....The ones way smarter than me are the ones who have the answers to these questions...for me, the point of my work is to just stop and feel something...there is no group I  can be righteous at...I'm in this myself...it is an evolution of consciousness...just being here, showing up tonight....you people are a part of that...50 million people around the world are part of this movement to recycle....what we care about, as humans, are relationships...

If we were to all stop consuming today, then there would be an economic collapse across the world....the ability of our economy to adapt and change shows how resilient we are...how can we develop a sustainable type of living? The concept of permanent, eternal economic growth is a fallacy, it's magic, it's like a pyramid scheme...its like a credit card...Sweden is looking at the concept of zero economic growth...it is perfectly possible to live in an economy of zero economic growth and focus on something else...take something other than our economy and build on that....what about our well-being? Forming a sacred relationship with this incredibly complex living system that must support us? If the economy goes downhill a little, or if we don't buy a new cell phone every year, we have to wait every five years, then maybe that is okay.