Bones (twiggy) & Trash

Hello there.

While Gravitas is taking some aggression out on golfballs (or at least that's what happens to me when I try to Golf) in Tennessee and possibly enjoying a fine Bourbon at the Knob Creek Distillery in nearby Kentucky for the next 7 days, I will occasionally be putting up a few posts. Most of you probably know me as Aaron, aka the cinemascapist, aka Hugo's dad, aka Gravitas son and so on.

I have several photos of twigs/trash sent in by followers of the blog that I will upload this week, but wanted to start things off with a new series by Chris Jordan (the "running the numbers" guy) that has trash and twigs and also bones that are twiggy-like.

I won't have anywhere near the amount of commentary that Gravitas typically prepares, but I hope you enjoy the links.

Chris Jordan's newest series documents albatross chicks that have died from human pollution in a brutally straightforward (or straight-downward) approach using no frills portraits of the decaying skeletons and their stomach contents. No doubt this series is hard to look at for anyone with a beating heart or even a slight appreciation for life. Maybe it's just me, but after viewing this series for some time, my mind went from thinking of how disgusting humans can be, to wondering how stupid these birds are? Don't get me wrong, the pollution is grotesque and unbelievable, but the more I scrolled and the more I inspected the stomach contents, the more I started to question the mental state of these birds. I began to wonder if I was missing some element to this story? Were they being poisoned by the pollution as well? Were their brains being damaged from some other outside element? Why would a Albatross parent feed a 4-5" metal bottle opener to a chick? Why didn't it recognize that a butane filled lighter was not food?

In the end I found that I have more questions about these birds than I do about the pollution.

© chris jordan

Taken from Chris' website:

Midway
Message from the Gyre

bq. These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

~cj, Seattle, October 2009

Comments

[Don]

Man after reading the news story last week about all the plastic in the ocean and washing up on shore, this brings it all to life.