The amazing photographer Chris Jordan came to NYU last week and I had the opportunity to listen to his talk and each lunch with him (along with the other members of my Reynolds Cohort).
Here is a short bit of the blog post for Reynolds that I wrote about his work:
http://wagner.nyu.edu/reynolds/2010/02/to-visualize-a-different-reali.html
"As a photographer, I am incredibly moved at the ability of his photography to take abstract statistics, ideas, and places and make me see and feel them. The power of a visual representation cannot be exaggerated. If we can visualize the enormity of the problem, it activates our ability to imagine a different way. It is when we begin to expand our imaginations of the way the world our world is that we can begin to visualize a different reality.
It may seem that our two different styles of photography are opposite- my work strives to be intensely individual, focusing on one person and one story at a time while Jordan's work looks at the overarching whole, showing the effects of millions of people. I believe, however, that they are indeed part of one narrative: the consequences of forgetting our interconnectivity as humans. My work aims to put humanity back at the center of the discourse- we must never let the huge and overwhelming discourses of ideology take precedence over people. Jordan's work inspires us to consider our practices as pieces of a whole, to never consider our lives in isolation. He often brings together fragmented materials that could never actually exist in only one place. His images remind us that we must mentally tie our habits to their consequences, it is when we lose that connection and think of our daily actions as singular and small that we also forget our interconnectivity as humans."
check out more of his work at: www.chrisjordan.com
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