Chris Jordan
Artist statement
This series, photographed in New Orleans in
November and December of 2005, portrays the
cost of Hurricane Katrina on a personal scale.
Although the subjects are quite different from
those in my earlier Intolerable Beauty series,
this project is motivated by the same concerns
about our runaway consumerism.
There is evidence to suggest that Katrina
was not an entirely natural event like an
earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane
season’s extraordinary severity can be linked to
global warming, which America contributes
to in disproportionate measure through our
extravagant consumer and industrial practices.
Never before have the cumulative effects of our
consumerism become so powerfully focused
into a visible form, like the sun’s rays narrowed
through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000
Americans lost everything they owned in the
Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is
whether we are all responsible in some degree.
The hurricane’s damage has been further
amplified by other human causes, including
failures of preparedness and response on
many levels; existing poverty conditions;
levee problems that were mired in political
manoeuvrings; poor environmental and
wetlands practices that left some areas more
vulnerable; and the conspicuous absence of
federal resources that were already being
used in the Bush Administration’s wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
From that perspective, my hope is that these
images might encourage some reflection on
the part that we each play, and the loss that
we all suffer, when a preventable catastrophe
of this magnitude happens to the people of
our own country. Katrina has illuminated our
interconnectedness and it makes our personal
accountability as members of a conscious
society ever more difficult to deny.