Grief as a Doorway to Love: An Interview with Chris Jordan

The renowned American photographer, filmmaker, and artist Chris Jordan is no stranger to ecological grief. His stunning 2017 film Albatross, which tells the story of a gut-wrenching environmental tragedy that is unfolding on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, is steeped in it. Today Midway Island is part of the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, but it was formerly a Navy base and still carries traces of its military history through abandoned buildings and infrastructure. Midway is home to a myriad of different animal species, including a large colony of Laysan albatrosses that serves as the focus of Jordan's film. Through a mixture of photographs and video footage, the film depicts in intimate detail the albatross life cycle and the birds' often fatal encounters with ocean plastic pollution.

The film's central image, which has become an icon of the Anthropocene, is Jordan's photograph of an albatross carcass decaying on the ground, its stomach filled with plastic. In Albatross, this photo is surrounded by mandala patterns that become superimposed on the screen, indelibly combining beauty and horror as the film's journey begins. While the results of runaway consumerism remain an uncomfortable presence throughout the film, Jordan also focuses on capturing the non-human perspective, exploring intimately the experience of what it might be like to be an albatross. In this way, the film is closer to a work of art than to a nature documentary, taking the viewer on a powerful emotional and empathetic journey between grief and love, sorrow and joy, despair and hope.

The desire to shock and amaze his audience into increased environmental awareness is a driving force behind all of Jordan's work. The photographic series Running the Numbers (2006-present) and Running the Numbers II (2009-present), perhaps his best-known work until the release of Albatross, are a visual presentation of the incomprehensible statistics of mass consumption. Using materials such as waste, plastic bottles, and other everyday consumer items, Jordan digitally reworks the images and assembles them from thousands of smaller photographs. The photographic series In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (2005), for its part, displays the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through photographs of damaged everyday artifacts following the storm's devastation.

In the interview below, which was conducted via Skype and email, Jordan elaborates on his efforts to instill a sense of environmental awareness through his art projects. Albatross, he explains, is an artistic intervention in a broader environmental conversation that he perceives as broken in its focus on quick-fix, "heroin shot" solutions. Allowing ourselves to feel grief, in Jordan's view, is a transformative experience that opens up doorways into environmental consciousness and reconnects us with our instinctive love for the natural world. Grief and empathy were powerful undercurrents in Jordan's own experience on Midway during the shooting of the film, which he recounts in this interview. Other topics discussed include the problem of ocean plastic pollution, the relation between art and activism, the drawbacks of apocalyptic environmental messaging, and the meaning of biodiversity loss.

Q. Albatross continues a theme that is central to your previous work. In your series of altered photographs and montages Running the Numbers II, for example, you explore the environmental impact of human activities by visually representing statistics about mass consumption. In works such as "Gyre" (2009), which imitates Hokusai's famous wave using 2.4 million pieces of plastic, and "Whale" (2011), a picture of a whale constructed from 50,000 plastic bags, you create deceptively beautiful images by repeating familiar consumer items and waste. The result of ocean plastic pollution is what you depict in Albatross. How did you first become interested in this topic?

A. I've been interested for a long time in trying to depict these mass phenomena that are otherwise impossible to photograph. This is one thing that is so interesting about consumerism: there is nowhere we can go and see the scale of it directly; we can't experience the enormity of it with...