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Chris Jordan has garnered a good deal of attention recently for his photographs depicting the scale of Western consumer culture. His works fetch widespread praise and serious prices, but Jordan is still dogged by the lack of penetration of his political message:

I decided to do the ugliest picture I could think of: an image of 125,000 cigarette butts. That’s the number that are littered around the world every second. I got 5,000 cigarette butts and I photographed them over and over, stirring them around, until I had an image of 125,000 cigarette butts. My intention was that it would be this disgusting, extremely edgy image. I hung it in my show and everybody flocked to that image and they were talking about how beautiful it was.

From Nicole Pasulka’s interview with Chris Jordan for The Morning News, located here.

One of Jordan’s problems is well known: photography has a nasty tendency to beautify its subjects, regardless of how despicable a photographer wants them to appear. Since that’s a well-covered quandary in the annals of photography, I’d like to set it aside for now in favor of a more basic question: What, exactly, is Chris Jordan’s goal?

In some of his works, Jordan takes on consumerism, using jet trails and soda cans in an attempt to turn his lens on the grotesque excesses of Western culture. (The image above, Cans Seurat, employs the number of soda cans used in the U.S. every 30 seconds.) It makes him appear part of the solution, rather than part of the problem–if Jordan’s work doesn’t shrink any landfills, at least he makes people think about what they’re doing, right?

I’m not so sure. On the whole, reasonably well-educated Westerners (the top tier of whom represent Jordan’s target market) are already well aware that the environment is endangered by their daily behavior. Witness the fad of buildings and corporations “going green,” magazines putting out special “green issues,” and other contagious environmentalist phenomena. I don’t begrudge Jordan for cashing in on the trend, but it seems ridiculous that he should calim to be raising awareness about a problem that’s otherwise under the radar.

Speaking of awareness–do we have any concrete evidence that it changes anything? Most social activism is founded on the principle that , if people were only aware of what was going on in the world, they would do something about it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we are more aware of what’s going on around the world now than ever before, as we’re hammered on all sides with information about the degradation of the environment, the genocide in Darfur, and unsanitary conditions across the globe. Yet these conditions persist. Reasonably engaged people are familiar with many of the difficulties in the world, but the solutions don’t seem to be forthcoming. They say that “awareness is the first step” to solving problems. Maybe it’s time to ask what, exactly, the next step is.

Whatever it is, Jordan’s work–and I think probably art in general–does not appear capable of addressing it. Instead, Jordan keeps trying to raise awareness, focusing not just on consumerism but guns, cigarettes, and whatever else is supposed to offend the right-minded of the twenty-first century. The sheer breadth of enemies Jordan attacks is, more than anything, what makes me question the intelligence of his project. His images of guns and cigarettes mourn the way objects waste human lives; his images of soda cans and garbage mourn the way living humans waste objects. At the current cultural moment, his position–at once in favor of the endless increase in number and quality of human lives and the health of the environment–is contradictory and untenable. You almost want to pat him on the back and say: “Look on the bright side, Chris: think how many cans of coke will never be consumed by the human lives destroyed by guns and cigarettes!”

For future projects, Jordan would like to continue taking morally unassailable positions on irresolvable problems:

I want to do an image that relates to the number of unwanted dogs and cats that are euthanized every day in the U.S. They euthanize more than 10,000 dogs and cats a day. I want to find dog and cat collars, I only need a few hundred and then I’ll just photograph them over and over. I want to make a Mandala made out of cell phones; it would be my last cell phone image, that will relate to the number of highway injuries and deaths that occur because people are talking on their cell phones. There’s something like 300,000 highway injuries and 4,000 highway deaths directly attributed to people talking on their cell phones.

Pasulka, op. cit.

If past performance is any indication, gallerists and collectors will rally around him, firmly positioning themselves in the “correct” camp and easing their own guilt in the process. Meanwhile, Chris Jordan has achieved the only coherent goal that he seems to have: to become known far and wide as An Artist With A Social Conscience.

Image © Chris Jordan.