![]() First, beauty is a powerfully effective tool for drawing viewers into uncomfortable territory. How do you deal with this?ĬJ: This issue comes up a lot in connection with my work. In a sense, you are transforming scenes of waste into photos that possess a strange beauty. JC: When looking at your work, at times I thought, “This looks very cool.” But then the caption informed me that I was looking at, say, piles of discarded cell phones, and there’s really nothing cool about that. I think Americans in the first decade of the twenty-first century will be looked back upon as some of the most spiritually lost people in the history of humankind. ![]() It is a tragedy beyond belief, happening right here in our own country, under our own noses, to our own selves. Instead we get in our BMWs and drive to our skyscrapers and shuffle our papers for all of the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives so we can afford our new kitchen remodel. We know we are somehow getting screwed, that all this stuff isn’t really satisfying, that we have lost something sacred that is related to the very core of our selves. We are slowly killing ourselves, and we all feel it. And maybe the biggest tragedy of all is that we are in denial about how our consumer lifestyle is sapping our own spirits. Our culture is in deep denial about what we are doing to our planet, to the people of other nations, and the people of the future. Talking to Americans about consumerism is like talking to someone with an alcohol problem. When I exhibit my work and talk about our rampant consumerism, no one ever seems to think I am talking about them. Or maybe the lack of resistance is a reflection of the depth of our denial. Maybe it is because we all know it is true: that we are living insane lives governed by materialism and greed. Have people complained?Ĭhris Jordan: I am frequently surprised by how little negative feedback I get for my criticism of the American way of life. I imagine that you must have run into some resistance when presenting it. Jörg Colberg: Your work strikes me as political, since it addresses our culture of consumerism. The images here are drawn from his Intolerable Beauty series, a photographic statement about American mass consumption. During ten years as a lawyer, he spent all his free time and income on photography. Despite his sense that he was headed in the wrong direction, he pursued the law degree anyway, and made photography his hobby. He ended up in law school “for all the wrong reasons,” and soon thereafter developed a sudden passion for photography. Both of Chris Jordan’s parents were artists he grew up around photographs, paintings, and art books.
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