The Great Garbage Patch in Photographic Images

I wrote a blog back in October 2007 about photographic artist Chris Jordan who began a series of digital photographs that present contemporary American culture by way of inconceivable statistics regarding American consumption. In his photographic series, Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait, each image portrays a specific quantity of consumption: Plastic Bags, 2007 - Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds; Plastic Bottles, 2007 - Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. Jordan portrays these statistics by incorporating them visually in large, intricately detailed photographic prints assembled from thousands of smaller images.

In his new series, Runninng the Numbers II: Portraits of Global Mass Culture (2009) Jordan depicts mass phenomena that occur on a global scale. The first few pieces in this series depict statistics about threats to the world's marine ecosystems.

Gyre (2009) is the first set of images in this new series which represents the Pacific Gyre, or The Great Garbage Patch. The Pacific Gyre is the largest garbage swill floating midway between Hawaii and San Francisco and is roughly the size of Texas containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash.

The below photographic image Gyre (2009) is composed of 2.4 million pieces of plastic – the estimated number of pounds of plastic that enter the world’s ocean’s every hour.

                              Actual image                                                                    Partial zoom

                           Zoomed in further                                                                  Viewed up close

Next in the series is a set of images called Shark Teeth, 2009. If you have read the 11th Hour Action blog about how sharks are under a global threat and yet may be a key to our survival then you may appreciate the significance of these images, and the serious consequences to killing sharks.

The below images depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day for their fins.

                         Actual image                                                                                        Partial zoom

                              Zoomed in further                                                                            Viewed up close

To fully appreciate these photographic images you should really view them directly from Chris Jordan’s website. There are 11 images from the Gyre series, and 5 from Shark Teeth. Plus there are 5 images that depicts 20,500 tuna, the average number of tuna fished from the world's oceans every fifteen minutes.