A Macabre Mirror: Chris Jordan's "Midway: Message from the Gyre" (2009–2013)

Chris Jordan went to Midway Atoll in September 2009 expecting to photograph a garbage patch. Like most people who had heard of the North Pacific Gyre, he imagined something you could stand in front of, an island of trash the size of a state, visible and therefore photographable. What is actually out there is a thin suspension of degraded plastic spread across an enormous volume of water, largely invisible from a boat and completely invisible from the air. Jordan found the garbage instead where it had been concentrated by biology: inside the bodies of dead Laysan albatross chicks, on a coral atoll more than two thousand miles from the nearest continent.

The photographs are frontal and plain. A chick's carcass lies where it fell on the sand, the feathers and soft tissue decomposed away, and in the cavity where the stomach was sits a dense mass of bottle caps, lighters, tube fittings, toy fragments, and unidentifiable colored shards. Jordan has been insistent about method: nothing in the frames was moved, added, arranged, or altered, and the plastic sits exactly as it lay in the bird. That claim matters more than it might seem. The images look composed, almost like specimen plates, and a viewer's first instinct is to suspect an artist's hand. The refusal to arrange is what converts them from illustration into evidence.

The mechanism is grimly ordinary. Albatross parents forage over vast stretches of open ocean and return to regurgitate what they have gathered into their chicks. Floating plastic reads to them as food. The chicks accumulate it, and every year tens of thousands die on Midway of starvation, blockage, and toxicity, their stomachs full of material that provides no nourishment. Jordan has described kneeling over the carcasses as looking into a mirror, and the metaphor does real work: an animal that can no longer distinguish what nourishes it from what poisons it, filling itself to death on the byproducts of abundance, is not obviously a description of the bird alone.

The series arrived early. Jordan made his first Midway photographs in 2009 and returned eight times over the following years, and the images circulated for most of a decade before plastic pollution became the mass public concern it is now. The wave that produced straw bans, national bag legislation, and the plastics negotiations at the UN was largely driven by the mid-to-late 2010s and by Blue Planet II. Jordan's albatrosses were already in galleries and inboxes when that wave arrived, and they supplied it with its defining visual grammar: the animal opened, the contents recognizable, the consumer implicated by the ability to name the objects. Anyone who can identify a bottle cap is already part of the picture.

It is worth placing the series against the other wildlife photography in this category. Nick Brandt builds elaborate constructions to make his point; Ed Ram arrived at a scene that was already unbearable and recorded it. Jordan sits somewhere unusual between them. He does not stage, but he also does not shoot in the documentary idiom of news, with its motion and mud and human figures. He shoots the birds as still lifes, the oldest and most domestic genre in Western art, the one built for arrangements of objects on a table. That formal decision is what gives the pictures their strange calm and their durability. A news photograph of a dying bird asks for a reaction. A still life asks to be examined.

The critique the series has attracted is worth including rather than dodging. Focusing grief on charismatic animals at the far end of the supply chain can leave the near end untouched, and a public that mourns albatrosses while consumer plastic production continues to climb has arguably been given catharsis instead of leverage. Jordan himself has spoken about the limits of horror as a strategy, and about how the work changed him. He went to Midway as an activist documenting an atrocity and came back over the years describing the project as one of grief rather than accusation, later turning his camera toward the birds alive: their courtship dances, their flight, the seven-year-old fledglings launching into the Pacific. His 2017 film Albatross is largely about beauty, and he released it free.

That turn is the most interesting thing about this body of work, and it is a genuine question for anyone doing environmental communication. Jordan's argument is that horror produces numbness and grief produces attachment, that we can only mourn what we love, and that images which make us flinch may be less useful than images that make us care. Whether that is true is unresolved, and the two hypotheses are hard to test against each other. But a photographer who made the most viscerally disturbing environmental images of his generation, and then concluded the disturbance was not the point, has earned a hearing on the question.