Chris Jordan

"Do you know the two countries that have the highest consumption of elephant tusks on earth? China and the United States."

Chris Jordan, lives in Seattle and works with photography, digital photo illustration, and film to create unmistakable bodies of work in unified themes exploring contemporary mass culture. His series “Intolerable Beauty” and “Running the Numbers” give artistic visual form to the enormity of global consumerism. His collection, “In the Wake of Katrina: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster,” features the devastation in New Orleans post-Katrina - and while the images are devoid of any people, they read as intimate portraits. Jordan is a winner of the prestigious Prix Pictet Prize in Paris, he traveled to Kenya to document native tribes, and the killing of elephants for their tusks, producing photographs with a haunting mixture of beauty and horror.

His latest work brought him to Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to capture firsthand the consequences of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on a colony of Albatross who are feeding toxic plastic to their young. This turned into an unexpected 8-year journey culminating in the creation of an original feature length film called "Albatross". What began as a documentary morphed into a powerful, paradigm shifting, contemplative poem about contemporary culture, interconnectedness, grief and love.

This is our first true long-form podcast and couldn’t have come at a better time, because it felt like a real luxury to spend two hours talking with the incredibly inspiring Chris Jordan.