Photographic artist Chris Jordan has transformed his societal observations regarding consumption and waste into an amazing body of work. “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” enables America’s disposable, consumption based culture to be visualized through large scale photographs.

Title Photo: Plastic Bags, 2007 60×72″ Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait
Chris Jordan 2007

This new 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 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

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 still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

Cans Seurat, 2007 60×92″ Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Denali Denial, 2006 60×75″ Depicts 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales of that model SUV in 2004.