The photo that made the plastics crisis personal

Chris Jordan's 2009 photos of dead albatross chicks with plastic in their guts went viral. Anna Turns looks at how it changed our response to the plastics crisis

When photographer Chris Jordan first stepped onto Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in September 2009 to document "overwhelming" levels of ocean waste, little did he know that his striking image of a dead albatross chick would go viral and change the world's response to the plastics crisis.

After taking some shots of waste piled high, Jordan was looking for a more personal way to highlight the scale of overconsumption. After hearing about an island 1,300 miles (2,100 km) northwest of Honolulu covered in thousands of dead birds, all with their stomachs full of everyday plastic items like bottle tops and toothbrushes, "I immediately felt this magnetic pull to go," he says. He was determined to "find a way to photograph [these birds] that honoured the depth of this environmental tragedy".

Jordan was not the first photographer to capture the impact of the plastics crisis on Midway's albatross population. The first known photo was taken by US researchers in 1966 and published in 1969, says Wayne Sentman, a biologist and board president of the Friends of Midway Atoll organisation. Plastic ingestion is likely to cause "poor outcomes" for albatross chicks because fragments can puncture the gut wall or cause dehydration, and heavy metals and other chemicals can leach off in concentrations which may be lethal to the birds, says Sentman.

While Jordan knew of previous photos taken on Midway, he attempted to bring a more emotional dimension to his images. He likens composing photographs of these dead birds to "a grief ritual".

"When we arrange sacred objects on an altar, there's a way that we naturally do it, with a symmetry and balance and we might spend a lot of time doing it until it all holds together," says Jordan. He chose to use a diffuser – a white material stretched across a frame that disperses bright light – to create a softer glow "that contributes to a feeling of a photograph that goes a little deeper".

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When Jordan returned to Seattle, he thought he'd completed this project. "I said goodbye to the island and went home, then processed the images and put them out there." He had no expectation that his images would go viral, long before the era of social media. But his photos quickly began appearing in magazines and newspapers all over the world. "It sort of appeared everywhere all at once," he recalls. Tens of thousands of emails poured into his inbox, and he had to employ a full-time assistant just to answer them all. "So many people were writing a trauma response," says Jordan. "People wanted to go to Midway and save the albatrosses, but the plastic is not coming from this island. It's a systemic problem."

A recent report by WWF projects that plastic production is expected to more than double by 2040, resulting in plastic debris in the ocean quadrupling by 2050. Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia and a world expert on plastic pollution, calculated that in 2010, eight million tonnes of plastic waste entered the ocean from sources on land. That is the weight of some 650,000 double decker buses.

Jordan decided to head back to Midway. He arrived in July 2010 to a "cacophony" of millions of albatrosses, dancing, singing and greeting each other. He was captivated. "That many birds is amazing. Immediately the other side of the story began to present itself and the theme became the name of the island – to stand midway between horror and beauty. Between the hell of seeing our plastic in this viscerally awful way appearing inside the stomachs of these baby birds, and the paradise of this tropical island that is being lovingly stewarded and protected as a marine sanctuary covered by millions of these beings that have no fear of humans," says Jordan, who visited Midway a total of eight times.

He also spent four years making his documentary, Albatross, which was released in 2018, just a year after two other pivotal films also highlighted the impacts of pollution on marine wildlife: David Attenborough's BBC series, Blue Planet 2, and the award-winning Netflix release A Plastic Ocean, produced by filmmaker Jo Ruxton.

Ruxton, the founder of marine conservation charity Ocean Generation, included a sequence about the plastic threatening Midway's albatrosses in her film. "What makes Jordan's photos resonate with people is that they recognise things that they have no doubt thrown away," she says. "You can see little fragments of plastic in things as small as mussels, oysters, even zooplankton – but it's when you see things that we actually use, that have passed through your hands, that makes people relate."

Ruxton holds up a big glass jar of colourful, everyday plastic objects – a printer cartridge, a golf ball, a toothbrush, four single-use cigarette lighters – that have all come from inside albatross stomachs. "That's changed peoples' hearts and minds in the talks that I do," says Ruxton. "It should be in our DNA to understand the ocean."

Jordan says he knows the photograph did contribute to awareness of plastic pollution. "There was a huge amount of ocean activism that popped up all over the world all at once – non-profits cleaning up beaches and [campaigning for] legislation around plastics, education in schools, legal work around the toxicity. It has been amazing to see."

In May 2023, a new disease in seabirds caused by plastic ingestion was identified by scientists at London's Natural History Museum. Plasticosis damages seabirds' digestive tracts, resulting in scarring. In severe cases this leads to infection and parasites, while restricting their ability to digest food effectively.

"There's no doubt things are improving – there was very little legislation before," says Ruxton. Bans on everything from plastic microbeads in toothpaste to cotton bud sticks and carrier bags have since come into force in various countries around the world. This week, negotiations continued between 175 nations towards developing a legally-binding Global Plastics Treaty by 2024. This new international agreement will herald a much more coordinated and comprehensive approach to reducing global plastic pollution by taking measures such as taxing on virgin plastic and banning all unnecessary single-use plastics. Countries have agreed to create a first draft of the treaty by November 2023.

But when it comes to finding solutions, Jordan still feels there is something missing. He believes the heart of this crisis lies in society's disconnect between actions and the impacts those have on the environment. So for him, successfully tackling plastic pollution hinges on rebuilding a strong relationship with nature. "Millions of people are waking up [but] it's the weirdest thing that the vast majority of people who are in power in our world, presidents and heads of our companies and big institutions, are the most disconnected that way."

"Every time that I was with birds as they were dying and many times as I was with them once they were dead, tears just poured. The grief was incredibly intense until finally one day it hit me – the reason I feel so much is because I love them," says Jordan.

"That's what grief is – a direct felt experience of love for something we are losing or for something that is suffering. I felt liberated to fully feel it. That's a doorway," says Jordan. He believes that a connection with nature and a raw appreciation for the world around us, rather than hope that things will one day improve, is what really drives positive change.

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