Chris Jordan Photographic Arts
 Once a corporate lawyer, now a photographer, Chris Jordan captures the artifacts of consumption on a scale we've never seen before. In his series "Intolerable Beauty," Jordan reveals large-scale shots of discarded items—cigarette butts, gas cylinders, cell phones, crushed automobiles—with breathtaking effect. Following the Gulf Coast's devastating hurricane season in 2005, Jordan presented "In Katrina's Wake," an exploration of the surprising ways a disaster transforms the things we take for granted. And more recently, Jordan embarked on a new series of digital art that takes every-day objects and literally runs the numbers: portraits of the 426,000 cell phones we throw away every day, the 1.14 million brown paper bags we use every hour, the 15 million sheets of paper we churn through every five minutes. If it's true that many—if not most—Americans tend to identify with the stuff we own and use, artists like Chris Jordan help us see ourselves from a different and telling perspective.
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