“Toothbrushes, bottle tops and cigarette lighters – all every day objects we take for granted. But as this startling picture taken of the contents of a young albatross shows, some of the 260m tonnes of plastic used annually ends up in the most unlikely places. Sometimes with tragic consequences.” Source.
On the same subject, Chris Jordan recently published his latest project, Midway, a harrowing project revealing the absurd and devastating environmental impact of our plastic waste on Pacific Albatrosses. The following statement accompanies his series along with a 6-minute movie:
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
~cj, October 2009
If you haven’t seen Jordan’s other projects, we recommend you pay a visit. In Intolerable Beauty and Running the Numbers, Jordan has attempted to represent the ungraspable nature of mass consumption in hypnotic, mind-boggling tableaux.
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