Chris Jordan: Gyre

Do you know how much waste you produce on a daily basis? And do you know how much of that goes into the rivers, ponds and seas? If you live in an industrialised nation, garbage-filled rivers and seas are certainly unheard of, but unfortunately, it is a common sight in many parts of the world. It becomes not just a toxic wasteland, but also a deathbed for marine animals. Needless to say, the stench is unbearable and the cost to treat the water astronomical.

Chris Jordan is a photographer who knows this all too well. His work frequently centres around our collective impact on the world, in terms of consumerism, mass production and environmental footprint. Not surprisingly, his new series also investigates mass phenomena that occur on a global scale.

“Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses. Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.”

Based on Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa painting, this series depicts statistics about threats to the world’s marine ecosystems. 2.4 million pieces of plastic was collected from the Pacific Ocean and arranged to resemble the original painting. This number is equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour.