Photography by Chris Jordan

Halfway between the U.S. and Japan lies an island of albatross that have unintentionally become plastic consumers. Lighters, small toys, golf balls, toothbrushes, and bottle caps imported from the nearby Pacific Garbage Patch are among the birds’ staples. Rupturing this surreal symbioses are Chris Jordan’s Midway photographs. Taken only weeks ago, the images depict decaying carcasses of albatross chicks gorged with plastic. Intolerably beautiful (a phrase taken from another project of Jordan’s depicting our collective environmental impact), the photographs are visible consequences of our everyday lives.
     Nestled in the North Pacific, Midway Atoll is a collection of three small islands that are home to seventy percent of the world’s Laysan Albatross. A once-flourishing ecosystem, the islands are now covered in plastic, brought there by adult albatross that mistake it for food and feed it to their young. Consisting on this diet of human garbage, forty percent of all albatross chicks die every year from starvation, suffocation, or poisoning. What this means for the future of the albatross is hard to determine: “But to find lethal quantities of our plastic trash inside baby birds on one of the remotest islands on Earth — it’s like a diagnosis for our planet,” Jordan remarks. “It’s a warning sign of a far bigger and more frightening issue.”