Beauty as a Three-Dimensional Container

“How do we face the dark realities of the human world? As the distance between how things could have been and how they are actually going widens every day, how do we bear the rage, terror, disappointment, and grief that threaten to overwhelm us like a tidal wave? For me at least, one thing feels certain: turning away is not an acceptable response. Our collective shadow affects all of us on the deepest unconscious channels, and to really know and feel this seems imperative as part of living an authentic life.”—Chris Jordan

Beauty Emerging

By Chris Jordan

PATAGONIA Chile—(Hubris)—March 2025—How do we face the dark realities of the human world? As the distance between how things could have been and how they are actually going widens every day, how do we bear the rage, terror, disappointment, and grief that threaten to overwhelm us like a tidal wave? For me at least, one thing feels certain: turning away is not an acceptable response. Our collective shadow affects all of us on the deepest unconscious channels, and to really know and feel this seems imperative as part of living an authentic life.

And at the same time, the mind can zoom itself out like an astronaut observing the Earth from space and see that in every moment the world is an incomprehensibly complex and amazing miracle. Every creature, every plant, every ecosystem, from the microscopic on out to the entire cosmos, is impossibly wondrous. And what of the unfathomably mysterious fact that each of us is alive to experience all of this in the first place? Words fail.

One thing I notice in my own mind is that contemplating Life’s beauty does not balance out any of the darkness, tragedy, violence, or injustice in our world. There is no balancing those things. But I do wonder if it is possible for these two viewpoints on life to somehow meet in the middle and touch each other. Beyond the inherently 50-50 implication of the Yin-Yang symbol, or Libra’s scales of justice, what is the right relationship in our heart and mind, between darkness and beauty?

These are some questions that motivate my work these days; that will be the foundation for my offerings here. I am excited and honored to build on these ideas and share with you.

This project, titled “Intolerable Beauty,” was my initial visual exploration into American mass consumption. Reading about consumerism at the time, books such as Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam, among many others, was like waking up from the matrix. The shock of seeing this destructive monster appear through the haze set me on a mission to look into the many corners of the collective mind that give rise to its existence.

To make this particular photo, I visited a cell phone shredding center in Atlanta. I brought a picture of a galaxy with me and used it to arrange several thousand phones on the floor to approximate its swirling shape, with the intention of evoking galactic size, gravity, and a sense of being caught in an inescapable spiral.

Searching around for piles of the detritus of our mass consumption, I happened upon this car-shredding facility at the Port of Tacoma, Washington. Their shredder was out of commission, resulting in a backlog of cars piled up like layers in the Grand Canyon.

I found a strange kind of beauty here in the rich palettes and sun-faded colors that appeared like an impressionistic overlay on the twisted metal subjects. Color to me is its own channel of visual experience, distinct from our ability to see forms and textures, which can be depicted in black and white. Like a musical soundtrack in a movie, color runs parallel in the mind, connected to but not dependent on the underlying visual form. In this way, I think of color as being a separate sense. I find this parallel relationship to be particularly interesting where the color is complex and gorgeous, while the subject itself is mundane or unattractive, as in the case of piles of garbage.

In the days before 9/11, it was much easier to explore places like this garbage yard in the Port of Seattle. A primary intention of this series was to confront the enormous scale of our mass consumption, and, early on, I thought that was what I was doing. I framed this scene to amplify a sense of claustrophobia, leaving only a small amount of ground for the viewer to metaphorically stand on, and only a small amount of air left at the top in which to breathe. Then, after I had clicked my camera’s shutter, something happened that put the scene in a different perspective.

An enormous tractor machine came rumbling around the corner and scooped up the entire pile and dumped it with a rattling roar into a nearby rail car. The driver stopped, climbed down, and came over to inquire about my interest in photographing garbage. I asked him about the train, and he said, “Oh, that’s the garbage train. It’s a mile long; leaves Seattle every day for a landfill in Oregon. That pile I just loaded was some of one-day’s-worth of Wallingford’s garbage.” (Wallingford is a small neighborhood in Seattle).

I realized that I was not beholding the scale of our mass consumption at all; I was seeing a single drop in a vast and mostly-invisible river.

I am fascinated by the existence and contents of our collective unconscious. This phenomenon is difficult to detect as it resides in one’s own mind, but evidence of it may be observed in the physical world in a thousand ways. As a student of the teachings of Carl Jung, I am particularly drawn to the powers of symbolism and archetype to shape stories on unconscious levels, and so I am always looking for these as photographic material. This pile of sawdust at a lumber mill in Tacoma, Washington, was so huge that it took on geologic features: strata, foothills, alluvium, a summit. I approached it stylistically, just as I would frame a grand landscape, leaving it to the viewer to make the mental leap (with the help of the title) to realize the tragic scene they were actually looking at.

This was one of the first photographs in a series made on Midway Island in the middle of the North Pacific. I went there at a time of year when the live birds were all out at sea; what remained on the ground were the carcasses of tens of thousands of their offspring whose stomachs had been filled with plastic during feedings. None of the plastic in these photos was arranged, placed, manipulated, or altered in any way, either at the time or later in Photoshop.

For me a primary intention here was to shift what I see as the profoundly broken mainstream environmental conversation that emphasizes blame, shame, finger pointing at others, and “calls to action” to make infinitesimally small changes in personal behavior as supposed solutions to massive systemic global environmental problems. Rather than feed that unhealthy paradigm, my intention was to witness and feel the depth of this tragedy, as a doorway to the transformative experience of grief.

When I first met the live birds on my second trip to Midway, what had started as a journey to witness tragedy began to morph into a love story. More than a million albatrosses make this tiny island their home base, and they are not predators, nor have they ever had a predator; hence they have no fear instinct. They may be approached and observed extremely close-up without any fear response, which is astonishing and opens into a transformative experience with these wild beings. At close range, their intelligence, sentience, complex communication, and abilities to feel things that we don’t typically associate with small-brained beings, became more and more obvious. My experience with them fundamentally changed the way I see all animals and grew into an eight-year obsession that resulted in my film “Albatross” (2018).

The moment I knew I had to make a film was when I first beheld the Albies doing their impossibly gorgeous mating dance. Their dance is made up of a series of elegant gestures that become more and more synchronized as a pair practices together. To narrow down their choice of a lifetime mate, the young birds dance with many prospective partners over several seasons, eventually finding one that they are able to synchronize with on what looks like a telepathic level. Photographs can’t begin to do justice to this magical ritual, so to see it in motion I invite you to watch “Albatross” (free online). If possible, watch on a system with good sound; there is lots of marvelous music and vivid island audio.

The experience of Midway served as an inflection point in my own journey, moving the needle of attention away from the darkness of our culture and toward the beauty of our world.

I have long believed that the mainstream environmental story about crisis and apocalypse is not an effective way to relate to the public or shift our culture. Doomsday environmentalism tends to amplify fear in the collective mind, leading to all kinds of unconscious societal effects that no one wants or intends. Among others I suspect that environmental doomsday messaging has played a role in the rise of fascism in the US and around the world. It is well understood that the basis for fascism is unconscious fear, which manifests as anger, rage, racism, hatred, etc.; and what more frightening message could there be than alarming stories from supposedly credible sources, of upcoming world-ending disasters?

How many times have we each heard the statement, “If you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention?” Millions of young people live in a state of existential anxiety and paralysis, triggered by the many forms of apocalyptic warnings they have seen and heard for their whole lives from well-meaning environmentalists. I see this heartbreaking phenomenon when I visit schools and speak with students of all ages, all over the world.

Lately, I have become interested in how to change this paradigm, to shift the environmental narrative on a basic level into a more inspiring and hopeful place. I see beauty as offering a way to make a kind of energetic Aikido move in the collective story field; not as a form of avoidance or denial, but as a container in the heart and mind.

Poets and philosophers across the ages have spoken of beauty’s essential power as an antidote to darkness and to the egoic tendencies the mind. Like a compass that points home, beauty helps us stay connected with what matters on a basic level. Whatever currents might be moving in the human world, below, like a subterranean river, beauty’s grace flows unperturbed.

Here at the southern tip of South America, where I have had the good fortune to live for several years, I find a particular kind of “slow beauty” that captures my imagination. Along the Patagonian shore, the subtle tonalities of sea and sky quiet the senses and expand awareness. The centering space of the horizon beckons the soul toward a widening perspective. Time stretches out, and inside the changing landscape a stillness reveals itself.

This experience doesn’t solve any of our problems, but in the increasing chaos of our world, it does offer a soft place, like a nest, where the heart is invited to pause, listen, and remember.