“Gyre” depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic—equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. Art is not only relevant right now; it has a crucial role to play in the battle for our collective sanity. Miracles and Tragedies: Conveying the Wonder of Life Through Photographs, Inspirational artist But I was afraid to follow it as a career, afraid of going to art school and failing artistically and financially, so I went to law school and spent ten years cooped up in a Seattle law office like a caged animal. © Chris Jordan, Drowned Laysan albatross fledgling, Midway Island, 2010. [8] There has been little activity regarding the project (since 2014) although it was stated to be "in progress" as of 2016. Jordan is a strong believer in the transformative power of photography and all of the work he makes is animated by a belief in photography’s unique ability to convey a reverential relationship with our wondrous surroundings. How do you face these problems squarely day by day while at the same time maintaining a positive/productive attitude? Chris Jordan shares his views on the power of photography — “Art has always made an immeasurably important difference in human culture, and right now might be the most potent time ever for the arts to contribute to the healing and transformation of our world.” Laysan albatross chick hatching from its egg, Midway Island, 2012. When hundreds of millions of people all collaborate in suppressing collective fear, then we fall into a kind of trance that can lead us to commit atrocities. Chris Jordan is an artist based in Seattle, Washington. Projects include Suburban Sublime, Ablation Points, Artifactory, Alabama Swamps, and Classical Landscape Photography. Or rational argument? Editors’ Note: To find out more about Jordan and his inspirational work, please visit his website. Boutique fine-art wedding photographers based in Palm Beach, we take an artistic, story-telling approach to every wedding. I find that approach to be disrespectful and usually loaded with irony and hypocrisy, and it doesn’t work anyway. Jordan is a strong believer in the transformative power of photography and all of the work he makes is animated by a belief in photography’s unique ability to convey a reverential relationship with our wondrous surroundings. When we do that, we discover that we have all kinds of choices we didn’t even know we had a moment previously, and the world changes before our eyes. Chris Jordan is a 46-year-old photographic artist based in Seattle, USA. Chris’s Midway images have reached a worldwide audience in 2010, but prints of this series have not yet been publicly exhibited. CJ: Photography for me is magical on so many levels. © 2020 LensCulture, Inc. Photographs © of their respective owners. My Dad was a photo historian and a photography collector, so I was steeped in the medium from a young age. Compelled by his interest in the legacy of one of the USA’s largest corporations, this photographer set out on a road trip to unearth the connections between a small town, a file of lost negatives, and Wal-Mart. I think perhaps the fact that we are collectively losing contact with our pre-verbal experience—intuition, feeling, amazement, wonderment, our innate love for Life, and so on—is a primary reason why we have gotten ourselves into the mess we are in. I think the way people behave is their own choice and responsibility. CJ: Fear is dangerous because it tends to operate below the level of conscious awareness. LensCulture’s managing editor, Alexander Strecker, reached out to Jordan to find out more about him and his beliefs surrounding the unique strengths of photography.