By Jesse Ellison
Photographer Chris Jordan has long made it his mission to turn statistics related to consumerism and consumption into something tangible, spinning abstract numbers into images that provide context and emotional connection to otherwise incomprehensible facts and figures. In September he traveled to Midway Atoll, a tiny island in the Pacific, to photograph decaying albatross carcasses, their stomachs and intestines full of plastic, in order to show how much discarded plastic is in the oceans and the food chain. A book, Midway: Message From the Gyre, and a documentary (pending full funding) about the journey are in the works. But it all began with the Pacific Garbage Patch, the infamous floating mass of refuse that’s said to be twice the size of Texas.
