More than ever, it is important to consider how human activity affects the environment. Chris Jordan is an activist who uses his powerful images that capture human activity to advocate for awareness. As an artist who immerses himself in his work, he demonstrates the power of photography by employing it to amplify emotion and change the negative connotation of the environmental crisis into one that advocates a positive attitude. Continue reading to learn more about Chris Jordan's artistic vision!

Where are you based?
Thank you for your interest in my work. I have been living nomadically for the past few years, traveling with only my camera and a few personal items, a whole new experience in the meaning of “home.” Currently I am based in Punta Arenas, Chile, a small town at the extreme southern tip of South America. The window of my studio apartment looks south across the Strait of Magellan toward Tierra del Fuego.

What inspired you to center your art around consumer mass culture and the environment?
Well I wish we could all just be celebrating and dancing and playing music and making art about beauty and joy. But we have these glaringly obvious elephants in the room that need to be addressed. A major one is our culture of mass consumption, a demogorgon whose tentacles extend into just about every environmental and social problem in our world. It first captured my attention back in my twenties when I read Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and the reading list led down a path into ever more alarming territory. The more one looks at consumerism, the more we see how destructive it is, not only to every corner of the living world, but to our own spirits, to our happiness and wellbeing and all the values we supposedly hold dear. It is like a form of collective insanity, an invisible trap that we voluntarily live in, that we can’t escape from until we can see it. So in a way my work has been trying to shine a light on it so we can begin to make out its shape.

How do you go about discovering ideas for your artwork?
Some series, like Midway or my Katrina project, arise from something I see happening out in the world that tweaks my mind or breaks my heart enough to compel a response. Those can require a major investment of energy and resources, so it has to be something that really gets me at the core. They generally tend to be tragic mass phenomena that aren’t being honored or paid attention to as they deserve. There is something about that form of cultural avoidance that triggers me into a kind of focused grief-rage that can power years of work. I know it is happening when I hear this particular sound in my mind, like a bell ringing in the back of a cathedral, deep and echoing, lonely and profoundly sad and also frightening.

Other projects materialize from the act of continually going out with my camera. I am always photographing, wherever I am in the world, just following whatever captures my imagination in a particular moment. Like here on the windblown Strait of Magellan, I have been photographing the moving water, the waves and clouds. I have developed a layering technique borrowed from astrophotography that allows for very long exposures, creating images that reveal an eerie sense of stillness that resides inside all of the wild storms and movement. I photographed this subject for more than a year, refining the technique, not thinking much about whether it was relevant to anything else, and it turned unexpectedly into a body of work that strangely mirrored the form of meditation that I was practicing at the time. The images are ultra high resolution and continuous tone; they look gorgeous on paper so I am excited to exhibit them. I always have various threads going like this, with lots of images that I love but that aren’t attached to an “official” project yet.

This process of letting projects emerge on their own, either by following my camera around, or by listening to the bell in my heart, is for me a key aspect of artistic practice that I like to emphasize when I teach. I can’t sit in a chair and think up a new series; projects have to arise spontaneously, as direct responses to the world, with their own life and energy. My job is just to get out there and pay attention and the rest happens by itself. For me the key is to work without judgment or expectation that the results will be good, or relevant, or original, or become a project, or anything else. I just empty my mind as much as I can and follow my instinct toward whatever excites it. In this experience, visual threads tend to emerge that my mind never could have thought of in advance. And this is how projects develop. They offer themselves, like gifts passing by on a conveyer belt. When it is in flow, it’s all I can to to keep up with it.

How would you describe your art style?
I think of photography as a clear window to look at real things in the real world. Despite AI and Photoshop manipulation and all the art-world conversation about how photography can never be objective or truthful, it is still the most representational of all artistic mediums, and to me that is its great power.

I try to use photography this way, as a tool for documentation, not to create “art” but to show you something real that I saw. That thing—the subject of the photo—does not come from me, it is not something I make. To me it is the art, and it was already there, already amazing in some way (beautiful or terrible or whatever), and already more interesting than anything I could ever create. My task is to document it cleanly, take its portrait, getting myself out of the way as much as possible. My hope when people view my work is that they can look through that window, without me being there, and connect directly with the subject, discover it for themselves and have their own relationship with it.

Your enlightening work, “Midway: Message from the Gyre,” is incredible. What served as the project’s source of inspiration? What messages do you want to get across to your audience?
When I first learned from a biologist friend that there is an island in the middle of the Pacific that is covered with dead birds whose stomachs are filled with plastic, I immediately heard the bell. This phenomenon represented everything I had devoted my work to for almost a decade, and I felt magnetically drawn to go there and witness it in person. It offered an intense and intimate way to face an intimidatingly vast global problem, at the same time as immersing in incredible beauty and encountering these magnificent beings, the albatrosses. In this way being on Midway was like being in paradise and hell at the same time. The island’s name became the poetic guiding theme of the project: to stand in balance mid-way between these polar opposites, between horror and beauty, grief and love, destruction and renewal, between the mistakes of our past and the still unwritten story of our future. The internal challenge was to try to grow one’s heart big enough to contain it all.

At its core the project was framed as a grief ceremony. Being with these birds as they choked to death on our waste taught me something about the power of grief as a way home to reconnection with self on a profound level. When we honor our pain for the suffering of other beings, in the absence of any ability to help them, we enter a potent crucible. Summoning the courage to not turn away, the agony of our own helplessness becomes almost unbearable. Eventually we come to realize that the reason we feel so much is because we love those beings. This was the central insight from my experience there: that grief is not the same as sadness or despair, grief is the same as love. Grief is a felt experience of love for other beings who are suffering, or for something we are losing or have lost.

When we see grief this way, as a doorway that leads home to our deepest connection with life, then we no longer resist it, and we are liberated to fully feel it. Its tremendous healing power then becomes available. This became the primary theme of my film Albatross, which is why I call it a love story despite its dark content.

“Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait,” a collection of your artwork, has been ongoing since 2006. What prompted you to begin this project? How has your artistic vision evolved?
RTN began innocuously as an attempt to understand a random statistic. I read that the Jeep company had just recalled 800,000 Jeeps because of a problem with their differential gears. I wondered how long of a line of Jeeps would that be? Would it be five miles long, or fifty miles, or five hundred miles? I realized I couldn’t estimate it by even an order of magnitude. So I geeked out and started pasting tiny photos of Jeeps in Photoshop until I had a giant picture of 800,000 Jeeps. It was a massive file that was hard to view effectively on a computer monitor, so I printed it out on my large-format printer. The result was a print 22 feet long, that depicted only a quarter of the total number before the roll of paper ran out.

It was shocking to visually behold a statistic this way. When I initially read the number, I thought I had comprehended it, but looking at a sea of 200,000 tiny Jeeps, I realized that my mind had not even come close to grasping it. This gave me an insight into the limits of our mind to comprehend mass phenomena. Every day we read statistics characterized by numbers in the millions or billions, and we aren’t comprehending it at all. In that absence of comprehension, we are disconnected from the underlying phenomena, and it is hard to feel anything about them. And when we don’t feel anything, we can become indifferent to tragedies and atrocities. This started me down a path of several years of pretty obsessive conceptual photographic work that became the RTN series.

Initially the images depicted statistics about our mass consumption, and then they took some turns into social issues like gun deaths, our prison population, the numbers of Americans overdosing on pain killers, the number of unwanted animals being euthanized, and others (they are all on my website if you are interested). The project eventually petered out, not because I finished it, but because I turned to other things. I still have a long list of RTN pieces I would like to make. I wish I had the resources to hire a small team of helpers to build them; we could crank them out and shine a light on issues that need attention. I imagine publishing one each week as a column in a magazine, like a kind of terrible cartoon. I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to do it, but the series definitely doesn’t feel finished yet.

And I also wish that other artists would feel free to adopt this style and make RTN-like pieces. I don’t feel any ownership over the concept, and if others would take up where I left off, including using AI or doing their own coding to assemble lots of photos in interesting ways, they could develop the technique further, including in 3D VR space. I wish RTN would become like impressionism, where lots of artists are doing their own versions and evolving it to new levels, and it isn’t thought of as copying me. There are so many issues out there that need a spotlight on them, and RTN feels like a useful kind of creative data visualization that can bring multiple themes and perspectives into a single frame. I have thought about making a YouTube channel or doing a workshop where I show how I constructed them, as a jumping off point for others.

What are some of the biggest takeaways you have learned while photographing the environment and human effects?
It seems clear to me that all of the problems in our world originate in our minds. Our brains are known to contain several basic design bugs, one of which leads to what neuroscientists call the amygdala hijack: the propensity of the mind to act based on fear without knowing that’s what is happening. This is related to the cognitive function that psychologists term the ego, which runs entirely on unconscious fear and leads to the behaviors that cause all of the suffering and destruction in the world. Any human-caused problem in the physical world can be traced back to this, like following a stream up a mountainside to its origin.

From this perspective we can see that environmental destruction is not the problem; it is a symptom of a problem that resides in the collective mind. And it is just the same with social problems such as greed, selfishness, abusive and exploitive behaviors, racism, violence, fascism, war; these all arise from the the same unconscious set of fears that live invisibly in the mind. Those fears produce thoughts that we believe are true, and then we act based on those thoughts, thinking we are behaving rationally. The result in the physical world is all kinds of insane phenomena: billionaires, nuclear weapons, surveillance states, fracking, millions of people in prison, and so on.

In this way environmental and social problems are connected at the roots, and they can be solved together. The long-term answer is not to develop some new technological band-aid to solve individual symptoms; it is to heal ourselves and our culture from the inside out. The spiritual technology for doing this is readily available and has already been around for thousands of years. If we put more attention on evolving ourselves in this way, then our suffering and destructive behaviors will change automatically, and many of our biggest problems will disappear by themselves. This collective healing and transformation feels like our obvious next evolutionary step, and I think that art has a primary role to play in bringing it about.

It is inspiring to see how you address environmental concerns. Why is it crucial to you that you use your artwork to address these issues?
I see art as a powerful arena for facing our internal and external challenges in a space of non-judgment, without blame, shame, or divisiveness. It offers a free, open, safe space where we can honor the complexity of hard issues, including our own complicity, and feel uncomfortable feelings that we might otherwise tend to avoid. Art can help us tolerate ambiguity, paradox, overwhelm, and the anxiety that can come with not knowing what the heck is going on in a really basic way. And it also can help us reconnect, or connect for the first time, with foundational nourishing experiences like joy, beauty, love, reverence, gratitude, wonderment, and so on. I don’t see art as the icing on the cake; it is the whole cake, or maybe even the whole meal. It where the heart of humanity lives, celebrates and heals.

My intention with my past work has been to use the tools of art to confront environmental and social problems as directly as possible, without needing to jump backward in time to the causes, or forward to the solutions. My work tries to hit the pause button for a moment, and just reside in a space of “this is how it is right now,” where there can arise a kind of clarity that puts things into perspective.

To me there is something disconnective about environmental activism that is all about looking at problems and then making lists of solutions. That whole conversation takes place at the most superficial cognitive level, and I have always suspected that its primary motivation is just to relieve unconscious anxiety about the true gravity of the problems. When we have third graders studying ocean pollution and then coming up with lists of what they are each going to “do” to solve this enormous and complex global issue, we miss bigger opportunities for emotional growth and honest relational perspective. Witnessing an environmental tragedy, even for a short time, and feeling our personal connection with the beings who are suffering, without turning immediately to so-called “solutions,” produces powerful feelings that, if contained wisely, can transform our whole world view. And it doesn’t only have to be a tragedy; witnessing something beautiful, without an agenda attached, can produce the same result. Anyone my age who watched Jacques Cousteau’s films in elementary school can attest to this.

I believe that intentional emotional process should be a central part of the environmental and social conversation, and several of my projects have attempted to fill what I see as a void there. I’m not advocating that we stop solving problems or talking about solutions. But we need to be vigilant that our approach to date—especially focusing on individual personal “solutions” to massive systemic problems—offers an easy escape hatch to avoid facing more challenging material. Our discourse can evolve this way, and art can create the space for this to happen.

What do you think we can do to resolve the problems caused by consumer mass culture?
Well we can begin with the well-established fact that we already have all of the technology and resources needed to solve all of the environmental and social problems in our world. The problem is not a lack of solutions; it is that we aren’t summoning the collective will to do them. So it seems to me that the conversation ought to be focused on that—which is a totally different conversation than the one we have been having so far.

As I see it, a key missing piece is feeling. We act when we feel something. And we act decisively and courageously when we feel something deeply. So how do we individually and collectively get to a place where we feel our love for the living world, so deeply and fully, in the marrow of our bones, that it becomes the foundation of our whole world view? How do we foster collective emotional growth, craft a safe and inclusive space for our culture to enter this territory, and through it become wise and loving stewards of the living world and shape a future that is rich, abundant and joyful? These are the kind of questions I wish would become the heart of the environmental conversation.

We noticed how your activism extends beyond the realm of the arts as you educate people through your talks. What do you hope people take away from your discussions?
Public speaking is something I never imagined would be part of my work, but I embrace it and it brings a lot of joy. I wish my photos could say everything I want to say, but photography is its own language, its own channel, like music, and there are things you can say with it, and other things you can’t. Presenting images and words together, I find that each one enhances the other, letting me go much further than either the photos or words could go alone. I love encountering audiences of all kinds and ages, and I have been consistently inspired by the depth of engagement I am met with, especially among young people. That whole channel of my work stopped when the pandemic began, I miss it.

We know you are currently on a trip. Can you tell us about it? What is the mission on this expedition?
Recently I have felt a seismic shift internally in terms of how I relate to the world’s problems and to my own life. For many years I focused intensely and even obsessively on the bad news, believing this approach was the most honorable and healthy way to face the problems of our world. And I think environmentalism generally has lived in this mindset of urgency and crisis, always emphasizing the negative, using words like disaster, catastrophe and apocalypse, advocating for panic, drawing scary graphs with lines that go vertical in the near future, setting looming deadlines beyond which all is lost, and so on. It was all done with the unstated and perhaps unconscious intention of terrifying the public into changing our ways. It felt like the right thing to do, so I’m not placing judgment or blame, but now our psychology has evolved. We are learning that fostering fear in the public mind does not inspire the changes we desire. It turns out to be a terrible way to relate to others. It can be divisive and traumatizing, producing the exact opposite results than what we intended.

We have all heard in a thousand ways from supposed environmental experts that everything is going to hell in a hand basket, and one poignant result is that millions of young people live in a state of existential terror that permeates their entire lives. This has created unprecedented levels of alienation, mistrust, apathy, depression, addiction, disassociation, and perhaps has even contributed to the rise of fascism in our politics. I believe it is time to shed the skin of doomsday environmentalism and look for a more positive and inspirational message as the basis for human stewardship of the living world. I am not proposing that we ignore our problems; we must keep laser-focused on them now more than ever. What we need to change is our relationship to each other around those problems. We need to make an energetic aikido move. To find a new north star to set our compass to.

This is the motivation for my current work that is all about turning towards beauty. I see beauty as the medicine we collectively crave right now. And by beauty, I mean it broadly: the complex miraculous exquisiteness of the living world, in all of its forms and scales, from the microscopic all the way on up. I mean the beauty of life, all of life, including our own. Every tree, every ecosystem, every living being including each one of us, the cosmos, the whole shebang. When we summon the courage to stand back and really look at it, it is all just incredibly, impossibly, magnificently beautiful. Astronauts call it the overview effect, but we don’t need to go up in a spaceship, or to a mountaintop, to experience it; it is available everywhere all the time.

The awe we experience in the presence of beauty can carry a transformative energy that crosses all lines of politics, language and culture. Beauty is a doorway that leads us home, to our natural state of wonderment, humility, compassion, love, and gratitude, not only for the world around us but also for the miracle of our own life. My sense is that the human story needs an infusion of beauty right now.

Guided by this internal map, I have just returned from four months with my friend John Verb on his 46-foot wooden sailboat named “Iona.” John became Iona’s steward quite by chance, and he invited me to join him exploring and contemplating one of the world’s most remote landscapes, true wilderness that is hard to access and astoundingly gorgeous: the wild fjords of southern Patagonia. My experience of the solitude and beauty here has been life-changing on multiple levels, and an exciting new project is emerging from it.

John is an airplane pilot, skydiver and wing-suit pilot, and now as a sailboat captain he calls his project Vertical Wings. Together we are collaborating to create a film about beauty, titled To the End of the World. It will be based on my still photographs as well as video footage, and I will direct, write, edit, and narrate, as I did with Albatross. The central theme will be beauty’s transformative power. I want to create an immersive meditative smorgasbord of gorgeousness, a psychedelic medicine journey, outward into untouched wilds and inward to the depths of our own hearts. The morphic field where these two things meet is place where new worlds can be born.

I have a whole new body of photographic work from our first voyage, and we are now preparing for a second one during the austral winter, with two additional team members including my friend Jim Hurst who is a legendary nature cinematographer and location sound recordist. We plan to spend 2-3 months filming, photographing, climbing, and immersing ourselves in Patagonia’s stunning solitude. I hope to have a film with accompanying photo exhibition and a book, ready for release in early 2025. We are seeking collaborators and creative partners of all kinds to join and support.

What words of wisdom would you provide to an aspiring artist?
Meditate. Study the masters, read their books, watch their channels and take their workshops (many of the best are free online), try the different approaches and understand the philosophies, learn bit by bit how to weed out the BS (hint: follow the money), and do the practice. Reading about it is different from doing it, the same way reading about playing a musical instrument is different from playing one. Do the practice. It will get you to a place that you can’t even imagine, so don’t believe your mind when it tries to write it all off in advance because it thinks it already knows where the path leads. Have the internal battles, face the demons, go through the stages, including quitting and restarting however many times you need to. The deepest wisdom that humanity has come up with so far is contained here. Do this, and everything else you want out of life will follow. Thank you for coming to my TED talk lol.

What is your motto in life?
I am not my thoughts.

To learn more about Chris Jordan, please follow him via the links below:
Chris Jordan Patreon
Chris Jordan
Albatross
John Verb and Vertical Wings
Also watch for the FB page and social media accounts for our To the End of the World project, coming soon.

Chris Jordan - Stories Through the Lens