Chris Jordan. Prison Uniforms, 2007. Installed at the Von Lintel Gallery, NY, June 2007.
Chris Jordan‘s populist brand of socio-enviro-photography deserves our respect. The skills necessary to direct (what I presume) is a team to composite his images, is small fries compared to his ability to sell his brand. He brings to surface issues as varied as breast augmentation for teenagers, deaths by smoking, prescription drug overdoses and airline plastic cup wastage.
Jordan argues that all these issues are tied together by our collective denial and connected by our search for a global view obscured by the massive numbers (billions, trillions) which we cannot realistically fathom. Jordan reckons his illustrations help us feel, and thus have us consider and alter own behaviours.
Critics would say that Jordan plucks issues at will, and given their variance, he might just be a fraud. Aren’t we supposed to specialise in our advocacy? Don’t we pick one topic?
I’d be sympathetic to this view if I thought Jordan was picking the latest cause célèbre, but he isn’t. Jordan represented the 2.3million US prisoners with 2.3million prison uniforms (I discussed this before).
Prison reform has never been sexy. Prisoners rights are rarely considered and that is because many of us suspend our emotions toward those put behind bars. Heck, even rape is considered humorous when it is put in a prison setting.
Whatever your take on Jordan’s craft and motives, his research and discussion of issues is passionately informed. For me, most of the time Jordan trumps my cynical view that he’s just selling a cute visual idea.
The closing two minutes of this well-circulated TEDtalk is convincing enough. Yet, I’d forgive people who thought of him as a sellout.
Jordan’s assertion that US citizens are in denial about their prison system is dead on.
Thanks to Stephen Sidlo for the reminder of Jordan’s work.
Prison Photography 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 2, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Artcritic
Chris Jordan’s work IS all about one issue. Take a few seconds to look a little harder and maybe you’ll see it.
February 4, 2010 at 2:07 am
Marc
I discovered Jordan’s work through his photographs of baby albatrosses on Midway island, whereas most people will know him from his digital composites. I found the Midway work pretty powerful as it goes beyond saying “We pollute, this is bad” by picking a tiny, isolated subject that suggests the global scale of the phenomenon. If this happens to baby albatrosses on Midway, imagine what else is going on in zones that are direct dumping grounds. How far does this stuff have to travel to get this isolated island. How does so much of it get there, etc? This all works because the images are strangely hypnotic: it is hard to believe that these rather beautiful recurring patterns of brightly-coloured trash occur naturally.
So then I watched the TED talk and I found the rest of his work pretty one-dimensional. He employs the same tactic over and over again, stacking objects to make a comment on the scale of any given issue. I don’t think he is necessarily a fraud or a sell-out for choosing multiple unrelated issues, but his approach seems so visually uninventive and repetitive that I fail to see how this is going to give people any kind of insight into the problem or encourage any kind of analysis beyond recognising that the issue exists. For example with the issue of deaths by smoking, is the issue really just that people don’t know that smoking can kill them? Are we not a bit beyond that now? Also it seems that Jordan’s approach only works for visualising very large numbers. What about statistics that aren’t massive numbers but that can be equally as telling?
As a counter-example of another photographer who focuses on issues that are under-represented consider Taryn Simon‘s American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. Check out her TED talk as well, which I found infinitely more interesting than Jordan’s.
February 4, 2010 at 2:17 am
petebrook
Marc. Great thoughts. Sometimes when I listen to these photographers I am amazed by how controlled they can be in their delivery. They’ve lived so close to the subject for so long, it seems they can’t muster the emotions of surprise and anger or duty that had driven them to the subject in the first place. Nachtwey falls into this montone category.
Taryn Simon is undoubtedly a far better talented photographer than speaker. More than her Hidden America series, I am interested in her work The Innocents (Umbrage), which has sat on my desk for a year now, but it is difficult to do a review of a book that alongside wrought images presents with care the stories of the 45 wrongfully-convicted persons at such length. My review might as well be: “Buy the book, lock yourself in a room for a day.” It really is fantastic.
Finally, I agree Jordan’s birds were better. And they were later … which would suggest he made a brave move away from the megapixelmuralbrand he’d established?