Chris Jordan

“My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, every day.”

“Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it.”

“When I learned about this tragedy that's happening in Midway - you know, these birds whose stomachs are filled with handfuls of our waste - I just felt drawn there magnetically.”

“I used to be a photographer - and now I'm some kind of digital photographic artist.”

“We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger, and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing.”

“My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.”

“All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives.”

“I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.”

“I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.”

“I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.”

“I want people to realize that they matter.”

“I wasn't interested in politics. My attitude about it was, I can't make a difference no matter what I do. And the truth is, I don't even care enough to try.”

“I hate the word 'rendering,' as it equates to 'pouring concrete' on ideas that demand continuing dialog. 'Trade secrets' imply hoarding of knowledge.”

“I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.”

“American culture is not about experiencing our shame, it's about denying it. It's been that way our whole history.”

“One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.”

“If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.”

“Set your compass to beauty, humor, and grief; stay the course no matter what, and I'll support you with everything I've got.”

“There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us.”

“How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?”