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The renowned American photographer, filmmaker, and artist Chris Jordan is no stranger to ecological grief. His stunning 2017 film Albatross, which tells the story of a gut-wrenching environmental tragedy that is unfolding on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, is steeped in it. Today Midway Island is part of the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, but it was formerly a Navy base and still carries traces of its military history through abandoned buildings and infrastructure. Midway is home to a myriad of different animal species, including a large colony of Laysan albatrosses that serves as the focus of Jordan's film. Through a mixture of photographs and video footage, the film depicts in intimate detail the albatross life cycle and the birds' often fatal encounters with ocean plastic pollution.
The film's central image, which has become an icon of the Anthropocene, is Jordan's photograph of an albatross carcass decaying on the ground, its stomach filled with plastic. In Albatross, this photo is surrounded by mandala patterns that become superimposed on the screen, indelibly combining beauty and horror as the film's journey begins. While the results of runaway consumerism remain an uncomfortable presence throughout the film, Jordan also focuses on capturing the non-human perspective, exploring intimately the experience of what it might be like to be an albatross. In this way, the film is closer to a work of art than to a nature documentary, taking the viewer on a powerful emotional and empathetic journey between grief and love, sorrow and joy, despair and hope.
The desire to shock and amaze his audience into increased environmental awareness is a driving force behind all of Jordan's work. The photographic series Running the Numbers (2006-present) and Running the Numbers II (2009-present),