Chris Jordan has just released on YouTube a 6′30″ video slide show of some of his Midway photographs with the music of Christen Lien.
An HD version can be viewed here.
Images and video: Chris Jordan. Music: Christen Lien
The original quicktime file (103 MB) can be downloaded fron this link.
Chris has released and posted on his website a selection of his photographs under the title “Message from the Gyre”.
In Chris’ words:
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
More details on Chris’ photography ethic can be found here.
The full selection of photographs released to date can be viewed here.
In the midst of the tragedy of plastic pollution on Midway, Jan Vozenilek’s camera tuns, for an instant, to the triumph of life over decay.
During our journey, Jan would occasionally steal away from the group, and wander alone in the island with his camera. The rest of us would wonder where he was, and what kind of footage he would be capturing.
The scenes on Brushstrokes 2 speak of moments of intimacy, where the cinematographer is alone in the field, tuning into the pulse of the land, and letting its natural beauty tell an ancient story of survival and renewal.
In this short video lies a reverence for nature so profound, that our eye has to concentrate on the small details, and peek shyly through blades of grass, lest the direct contemplation of the greatness of it all be overwhelming. As we watch, we feel the emergence of that peculiar sense wonder that is often thought to belong only to childhood. A sense of awe and discovery that we are taught to suppress and forget as we grow up.
As time slows down, and the rays of golden light fall gently on the tortured landscape of Midway, subtle brushstrokes of natural beauty are painted over a canvas too many times torn and blotted by the blindness of man.
Video by Jan Vozenilek. Music by Vanessa LeBourdais.
Scientists say that plastic now outweighs plankton 6 to 1 in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The lagoon of Midway Atoll is the perfect laboratory to witness all sizes of plastic slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. A variety of plastic washes up on the beaches daily, but not before some local fish make a meal of it.
Video by: Jan Vozenilek. Voiceover: Victoria Sloan Jordan.
Music by Christen Lien
Midway Atoll is actually composed of two small islands, Sand Island -which is the largest and the only one inhabited- and Eastern Island, slightly over one mile long, and separated from Sand Island by a narrow channel that provides access to the interior of the lagoon.
Matt Brown, Manager of the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, took us on a tour of Eastern Island as he and two volunteers inspected three fresh water ponds occupied by extremely rare and endangered Laysan Ducks. Eastern Island is entirely crisscrossed by abandoned runways dating back to World War II, today almost unrecognizable under a layer of vegetation that grows through cracks in the pavement. While nature slowly triumphs over dilapidated asphalt, iron and cement, Eastern Island has not escaped the onslaught of plastic pollution, which is present everywhere.
Video by Bill Weaver. Cinematography by Jan Vozenilek. Voiceover by Chris Jordan. Interviewee: Matt Brown. Music by Vanessa LeBourdais.
Early one morning I was out photographing along a meadow trail strewn with decaying albatross carcasses. The sun had just risen, and my camera was set up to photograph the exposed body cavity of an albatross chick filled with multicolored plastic.
I heard the sound of a motor approaching, and looked up to see one of the carts that the Thai maintenance crew uses to get around the island. The cart pulled up and stopped right next to me, and a Thai man stepped out. He was wearing canvas work coveralls and looked to be about fifty.
He smiled and made a slight bow, and after a short pause he pronounced two Thai syllables: “Kham… Wang.” Not sure what he meant, I repeated “Kham, Wang.” As I did that, he pointed to himself, and I realized he was telling me his name. So I pointed to myself and slowly said “Chris Jordan.” He repeated my name in a strong Thai accent: “Chizz Johdann.” I said “Kham Wang” again, trying to match his pronunciation of the nasal syllables.
Then Kham Wang noticed my camera, mounted on its tripod and aimed at the ground. He looked down and saw what I was photographing, and he gestured toward the bird with his hand. “Bebe,” he said in a quiet voice. “Bebe.”
It took me a moment to understand, and then I nodded and replied: “baby.”
We both stood there for a moment, looking down at the dead bird at our feet. Then Kham Wang looked back at me, and placed his hand on my shoulder, and said “Chizz Johdann.” I put my hand on his shoulder and gave my best “Kham Wang” once again. And with gentle smile, Kham Wang got back in his cart and drove on down the path.
~cj
A day off for snorkeling turns into a mission to recover a ghost net.
Video by Bill Weaver, voice over by Chris Jordan. Music by Christen Lien.
I’m confused by the abundant life and abundant plastic pollution here. It’s easy to slip into a fantasy that a sort of balance has been achieved on Midway Atoll. Birds nesting amidst plastic cigarette lighters, bottle caps, toys, umpteen bits and pieces of plastic; turtles pulling up on the beach to rest among plastic buoys and ghost nets and fuel containers; seals frolicking under the pier with discarded shampoo bottles – all of it getting along, or so it seems from a cartoon view. But then you begin to encounter the decaying bodies of albatross, almost all of them containing some amount of plastic, and some completely choked with it that there’s no mystery how this bird died.
How can I possibly continue to contribute to the stream of plastic into our waterways and oceans after seeing the albatross stuffed with plastic? Matches, people. Glass, metal. Re-use! Forget recycling, it’s not happening, and when it’s plastic it’s called down-cycling, anyway. What happens when we are up to our eyeballs in fleece and carpet and plastic decking?
I will go home a changed person after this trip. I’ve been an uber-recycler for most of my adult life. But now I can see that recycling is not the answer. We just need to stop making so much plastic. From here forward, my own consumption of it, especially disposables, will be under a high-power microscope. I’ll be considering every way in which I use plastic in my life, examining my wasteful habits more deeply, and asking myself what’s really important – a quick, disposable convenience or something with enduring value? It’s a good lesson for me on how to use stuff, and also how to enrich my life.
Consider joining the discussion about plastics on our Facebook group by clicking on the Discussion tab.
~Victoria Sloan Jordan
Until now, we have not shown the carcasses of the albatross chicks that Chris Jordan has been photographing, stuffed with plastic beyond belief.
So much plastic, and in such bizarre combinations of objects and colors, that we recently posted a video in which Chris explains his photography ethic: no plastic is added to any photo, and the plastic is never rearranged.
It will be more than a month before Chris’ photos are processed and released. This morning Chris decided to offer a glimpse of what these carcasses look like.
Plastic Beach
In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.
There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the worlds oceans.
Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.
To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremely powerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, invertebrates, fish, sea turtles… are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.
Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also the plankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.
But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day.
No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.
The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.
Video by Jan Vozenilek
Written and narrated by: Manuel Maqueda
Music by Christen Lien www.itsnotaviolin.com
Click here to see a satellite image of the exact location of this video (click on ‘view map’ and zoom all the way in.)