Plastic Bottles

Chris Jordan’s photographic work bridges art and environmental activism. “Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards,” he writes, “where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers of the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress.” The devastation depicted throughout his practice is evidence of what scientists and cultural critics have recently termed the Anthropocene: the present geological epoch, which is defined by planetary changes shaped by human activity that has resulted in global warming, species extinction, sea level rise, and pollution, among other problems.

To create Plastic Bottles, Jordan digitally stitched together several thousand photographs he took in his front yard, using 800 plastic bottles from the University of Washington Recycling Department, all captured in the same light and from the same perspective. The composite image shows two million bottles (the number used in the U.S. every five minutes), with hand-painted waves creating the sense of “an ocean of plastic.” His images are stunning in their sublime magnitude, alluding to earlier landscape photography, which celebrated the unadulterated terrain of American deserts and forests—the irony being, of course, that today’s vistas are often man-made horrors.