
Chris Jordan on The Midway Project
Photographer Chris Jordan sits down with filmmaker Riley Morton to talk through The Midway Project, his fine-art photography series shot on the remote Pacific atoll of Midway. Jordan explains how he found albatross carcasses there with stomachs packed full of bottle caps, lighters, and other plastic fragments, waste carried thousands of miles by ocean currents from the Pacific Garbage Patch and fed to chicks by parent birds who mistake it for food. The footage, shot by Jan Vozenilek and Joe Schweers, shows Jordan working among the dead birds on the beach, framing and photographing the bright plastic still visible inside decomposed bodies. He talks about why he chose to make the images beautiful rather than purely grim, arguing that horror alone makes people look away, and describes the project as an attempt to make an abstract global problem, ocean plastic, register as something specific and physical. It runs short, more conversation than full film, but the images he describes carry the weight.