Art as missive against consumerism
Every day in the United States as many as 426,000 cell phones are retired–either left in a drawer, recycled, or most often, thrown in the trash. Photographer Chris Jordan depicted that daily mass of silver-and-black detritus in his 2007 digitally rendered photo, Cell Phones (at left), which is part of the collection “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait.”
It seems appropriate that Jordan will be a featured speaker at the Feb. 1 Greener Gadgets conference in New York. Through art, Jordan, a former corporate attorney, tries to help people see the folly of consumerism and excess. And the confab is purportedly set up to encourage the development of environmentally designed electronics.
In this video from PBS, Jordan talks about his work, in which he shoots photographs and then stitches together images in Photoshop. “I couldn’t really show the scale of American consumerism. I could only hint at it,” Jordan said.
“There’s this contrast between the beauty in the images and the underlying grotesqueness of the subjects and it’s something that I put there intentionally because I was using beauty as a seduction to draw the viewer in to sit through the piece long enough that the underlying message might seep in.”
Other photos in his collection: an image of 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, equivalent to what Americans use every hour. Also, a photograph of 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the United States every month to make the paper for mail-order catalogs. (An estimated 100 million trees in the United States are cut down annually to deliver all those Pottery Barn and Victoria’s Secret catalogs.)
Let those images be an impetus to stop the catalogs (via a site like CatalogChoice.org) and recycle those cell phones–try mobile recycling site CollectiveGood.com. And of course, buy less.