Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, every day.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I'm just becoming more and more aware of this truly profound responsibility that we carry as individuals. And it's a responsibility not only to ourselves and to our families, but to the billions of people who still have to come in the future who will be dealing with our legacy.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I wasn't interested in politics. My attitude about it was, I can't make a difference no matter what I do. And the truth is, I don't even care enough to try.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I find myself walking these lines. Like I might be an artist, but I also might be an activist. And I'm trying to be both in a way that honors both and doesn't stray too far into either.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I think there's a tremendous amount of unacknowledged hostility in American culture.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

American culture is not about experiencing our shame, it's about denying it. It's been that way our whole history.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I'm not against shock and horror. In fact, I really belive in facing the dark realities of our time as the first step in coming out of denial. So we have to look into the darkness.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

When I learned about this tragedy that's happening in Midway - you know, these birds whose stomachs are filled with handfuls of our waste - I just felt drawn there magnetically.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan

I want people to realize that they matter.