matadorchange.com— Photographer Chris Jordan describes the photos in his series ?Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption? as his ?first foray into being an engaged artist.?
Jul 16, 2009View in Crawl 4
I just see a lot of stuff ready to be recycled.If he wants to get the point across, go to a landfill where the separation of recyclables would be a nightmare.
Our industrial processes have the capability of creating new polymers and other molecular structures that don't resemble anything that existed in the same quantities in nature more than 100 years ago. When you build a horse-drawn cart out of wood, iron, and cloth and then abandon it a few years later, the wood, cloth, and metal all breaks down and rusts, slowly disappearing and reassimilated into nature. It's fine if some animals come by and eat the dirt that it dissolved into.When you throw out a fleece jacket, Ethernet cable, or music player, so much of that is made up of synthetics that are durable to the point of overkill that it just does not reassimilate back into the environment like the wood, metal, ceramics, and fibers of the vast majority of human history. I love my tech, but let's face it, the factories are pumping out colossal volumes of synthetics intended to be used for only a few years or just months, yet the materials don't fit back into nature after that short period of usage life. Like every plastic floppy disk or old shampoo bottle you ever used. You used it for a very short time, now it is trash forever because it won't break down like traditional materials can. It's waste.That's what's different. In the past, we took what nature gave us and didn't really change it all that much. Now we take what nature gives us, create some wonderful and cool things that never existed before, but after it's obsolete or worn we give it back in a form that nature does not know what the hell to do with.
"There is no shortage of available land for use as landfill space - far removed from inhabited areas."Translation: This is a solution that might make sense if fuel was cheap.
stignordasJul 16, 2009
Chris Jordan is awesome, I hope to see his large graphics some day, they're enormous in person.
ianmackJul 16, 2009
It's like WALL-E... only real.
victor21Jul 17, 2009
Dugg for no iPhones in the cell phones picture.
Closed AccountJul 17, 2009
First photo is epic. Rest... meh.
americansfirstJul 17, 2009
USA! USA!
solkreJul 17, 2009
I just see a lot of stuff ready to be recycled.If he wants to get the point across, go to a landfill where the separation of recyclables would be a nightmare.
m0lluskJul 20, 2009
Giving some thought to what and how much to consume might help.
Closed AccountJul 24, 2009
Oh, so no other countries produce waste, MY BAD!
bosskeyJul 29, 2009
Our industrial processes have the capability of creating new polymers and other molecular structures that don't resemble anything that existed in the same quantities in nature more than 100 years ago. When you build a horse-drawn cart out of wood, iron, and cloth and then abandon it a few years later, the wood, cloth, and metal all breaks down and rusts, slowly disappearing and reassimilated into nature. It's fine if some animals come by and eat the dirt that it dissolved into.When you throw out a fleece jacket, Ethernet cable, or music player, so much of that is made up of synthetics that are durable to the point of overkill that it just does not reassimilate back into the environment like the wood, metal, ceramics, and fibers of the vast majority of human history. I love my tech, but let's face it, the factories are pumping out colossal volumes of synthetics intended to be used for only a few years or just months, yet the materials don't fit back into nature after that short period of usage life. Like every plastic floppy disk or old shampoo bottle you ever used. You used it for a very short time, now it is trash forever because it won't break down like traditional materials can. It's waste.That's what's different. In the past, we took what nature gave us and didn't really change it all that much. Now we take what nature gives us, create some wonderful and cool things that never existed before, but after it's obsolete or worn we give it back in a form that nature does not know what the hell to do with.
bosskeyJul 29, 2009
"There is no shortage of available land for use as landfill space - far removed from inhabited areas."Translation: This is a solution that might make sense if fuel was cheap.