Intolerable Beauty — Portraits of American Mass Consumption
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 10.19.05
Chris Jordan takes pictures of garbage. He says "Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity."
We find the photographs stunningly beautiful, which is certainly not our usual reaction to looking at garbage. View this collection at ::Chris Jordan Photography
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