Chris Jordan: When You Bring Beauty and Grief Together

One powerful elixir is beauty. There is nothing quite like beauty. When you bring beauty and grief together, you can't look at it, because it's so sad -- and you can't look away, because it's so beautiful. It's a moment of being transfixed, and the key is turned in the lock. 

- Chris Jordan

 http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#cig-butts

The Above by Chris Jordan is from  Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait:

Cigarette Butts, 2013     60x72"

Depicts 139,000 cigarette butts, equal to the number of cigarettes that are smoked 
and discarded every 15 seconds in the US. Cigarette butts are the number one 
littered item found in America’s public spaces including parks, beaches, waterways, 
and urban environments. This form of litter has far-reaching impacts on the 
environment: littered butts leach numerous toxic chemicals and carcinogens, 
contaminate water sources, and poison wildlife. The filters are made of cellulose 
acetate, a type of plastic that does not biodegrade.

MIDWAY: MESSAGE FROM 
THE GYRE (2009)

By © Chris Jordan, Photographic Arts

As my team and I prepare to travel back to Midway Atoll, I cannot help but note the macabre juxtaposition of the environmental disaster that is happening in the Pacific Ocean, with the one that is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The two phenomena are oddly parallel, involving (among other grotesque features) the deaths of untold numbers of sea birds, caused by millions of tons of our petroleum products that have poured into the ocean via our collective negligence. And in each case the birds can be viewed as messengers, serving as one small warming signal of a much larger calamity, with global consequences, in which our individual consumer lifestyles are unavoidably complicit.

My friend the artist Richard Lang says the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but indifference. 

For more, please go here: http://coastalcare.org/2010/08/midway-atoll-northwestern-end-of-the-hawaiian-archipelago/