Intolerable Beauty
- Words
- Anke Nunheim
Chris Jordan is an american artist and cultural activist based in Seattle, USA. His work explores contemporary mass culture from a variety of photographic and conceptual perspectives, connecting the viewer viscerally to the enormity and power of humanity’s collective behaviors.
+ Read MoreIn his series ‘Intolerable Beauty’ he portraits american mass consumption, while he is edge-walking the lines between beauty and horror. He explores around the country’s shipping ports and industrial yards and he is at the same time appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. He says: ‘The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits’. His hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but he have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.
All images © Chris Jordan
