Chris Jordan (born 1963) is an American artist, photographer and film producer based in Seattle, Washington. [1]
Many of Jordan's works are created from photographs of garbage and mass consumption, a serendipitous technique which started when he visited an industrial yard to look at patterns of color and order. Jordan uses everyday commonalities such as a plastic cup and defines the blind unawareness involved in American consumerism. His work, while often unsettling, is a message about unconscious behaviors in our everyday lives, leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions about the inevitable consequences which will arise from our habits. [2]
Jordan's work can be grouped in the following series:
Midway: Message from the Gyre (2009–2013) is a series of photographs depicting rotting carcasses of baby Laysan albatrosses filled with plastic. These birds nest on Midway Atoll and are being fed plastic by their parents, who find floating plastic in the middle of the ocean and mistake it for food. This is a part of an ongoing arts and media project called Midway Journey, which has its own website.
Buy Nothing Day is a day of protest against consumerism. In North America, the United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden, Buy Nothing Day is held the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, concurrent with Black Friday; elsewhere, it is held the following day, which is the last Saturday in November.
Consumerism is a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status. It emerged in Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution and became widespread around 1900. In economics, consumerism refers to policies that emphasize consumption. It is the consideration that the free choice of consumers should strongly orient the choice by manufacturers of what is produced and how, and therefore orient the economic organization of a society. Consumerism has been criticized by both individuals who choose other ways of participating in the economy and environmentalists concerned about its impact on the planet. Experts often assert that consumerism has physical limits, such as growth imperative and overconsumption, which have larger impacts on the environment. This includes direct effects like overexploitation of natural resources or large amounts of waste from disposable goods and significant effects like climate change. Similarly, some research and criticism focuses on the sociological effects of consumerism, such as reinforcement of class barriers and creation of inequalities.
Genre art is the pictorial representation in any of various media of scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, work, and street scenes. Such representations may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Some variations of the term genre art specify the medium or type of visual work, as in genre painting, genre prints, genre photographs, and so on.
Consumer Reports (CR), formerly Consumers Union (CU), is an American nonprofit consumer organization dedicated to independent product testing, investigative journalism, consumer-oriented research, public education, and consumer advocacy.
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Outdoor Channel is an American pay television channel focused on the outdoors, offering programming that includes hunting, fishing, western lifestyle, off-road motorsports and adventure. It was launched on April Fool's Day 1994. The network can be viewed on multiple platforms including high definition, video on demand as well as on its own website. In 2013, Outdoor Channel was acquired by Kroenke Sports Enterprises.
Zofia Kulik is a Polish artist living and working in Łomianki (Warsaw), whose art combines political criticism with a feminist perspective.
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology. It has been defined as "intentionally and meaningfully excluding or cutting goods from one's consumption routine or reusing once-acquired goods with the goal of avoiding consumption". The ideology is opposed to consumerism, being a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status.
The term vernacular photography is used in several related senses. Each is in one way or another meant to contrast with received notions of fine-art photography. Vernacular photography is also distinct from both found photography and amateur photography. The term originated among academics and curators, but has moved into wider usage.
The electronics industry is the economic sector that produces electronic devices. It emerged in the 20th century and is today one of the largest global industries. Contemporary society uses a vast array of electronic devices that are built in factories operated by the industry, which are almost always partially automated.
Denis Peterson is an American hyperrealist painter whose photorealist works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Tate Modern, Springville Museum of Art, Corcoran MPA, Museum of Modern Art CZ and Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York.
Katrina refrigerators are refrigerators that were destroyed or rendered unusable during Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, and their aftermath. Many were made into temporary folk art.
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.
Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins is a British photographer and member of Magnum Photos, best known for his depictions of Africa, Afghanistan, England, Northern Ireland, and Japan.
The Prix Pictet is an international award in photography. It was founded in 2008 by the Geneva-based Pictet Group with the mandate to use the power of photography to communicate messages about sustainability to a global audience. Its goal is to uncover photography of the highest order, applied to current social and environmental challenges. With the participation of over 4,700 photographers, the prize is judged by an independent jury and carries a prize of CHF 100,000. Since 2008 the ten cycles of the Prix Pictet have been shown in more than 100 exhibitions across 25 countries with visitor numbers of over 550,000. The ten Prix Pictet winners are Benoit Aquin, Nadav Kander, Mitch Epstein, Luc Delahaye, Michael Schmidt, Valérie Belin, Richard Mosse, Joana Choumali, Sally Mann and Gauri Gill.
Ted M. Jackson is an American photojournalist, writer and public speaker who has spent over three decades exploring the human condition while covering news, sports and features for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Louisiana. He contributes to the newspaper’s extensive gallery of photographs of the Greater New Orleans Area.
Eva & Franco Mattes are a duo of artists based in New York City, operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org.
Media consumption or media diet is the sum of information and entertainment media taken in by an individual or group. It includes activities such as interacting with new media, reading books and magazines, watching television and film, and listening to radio. An active media consumer must have the capacity for skepticism, judgement, free thinking, questioning, and understanding. Media consumption is to maximize the interests of consumers.
Frank Relle is an American photographer who lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Shirin Aliabadi was an Iranian contemporary multidisciplinary visual artist whose work focused on women's issues, gender representation, and the beauty industry. She is best known for depiction of rebellious Iranian women in her Girls in Cars and Miss Hybrid series of photographs.