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Running the Numbers March 24 2008

Today I came across a series of images I feel compelled to share, called Running the Numbers, by Chris Jordan. Chris is a photographer here in Seattle. You might say he's an Andy Goldsworthy of American trash; making statistics of our consumption visible and real with his painstaking photographic assemblages that manage to be horrible and beautiful at the same time. Here is his artist's statement and one of his images, reproduced here with his permission.

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait     
 
This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007

Plastic Cups, 2008
60" x 90"

Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.


















Partial zoom:


Detail at actual print size:


Others in the series include Barbie Dolls, depicting "32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006," Plastic Bottles depicting "two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes." and Cell Phones, depicting "426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day."

Please have a look at his website for more. http://www.chrisjordan.com/

-RH