Chris Jordan – Running the Numbers

www.chrisjordan.com and previously featured

“Running the Numbers 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 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. ”

Three Second Meditation, 2011 – 44×44″ and 60×60″

Depicts 9,960 mail order catalogs, equal to the average number of pieces of junk mail that are printed, shipped, delivered, and disposed of in the US every three seconds.

Ben Franklin, 2007 – 8.5 feet wide by 10.5 feet tall in three horizontal panels

Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.

Dog and Cat Collars, 2009 – 60×67″

Depicts ten thousand dog and cat collars, equal to the average number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the United States
every day.

“Running the Numbers II looks at mass phenomena that occur on a global scale. Similarly to the first series, each image portrays a specific quantity of something: the number of tuna fished from the world’s oceans every fifteen minutes, for example. But this time the statistics are global in scale, rather than specifically American.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed.

I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger, fear, grief, and rage that this process can entail. Perhaps these uncomfortable feelings can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community. This hope continues to motivate my work.”

Venus, 2011 – 60×103″ in one panel, and 8×13 feet in three panels

Depicts 240,000 plastic bags, equal to the estimated number of plastic bags consumed around the world every ten seconds.

Shark Teeth, 2009 – 64×94″; based on a watercolor painting by Sarah Waller

Depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day
for their fins.

Year of the Tiger, 2010 – 62×62″

Depicts 3200 toy tigers, equal to the estimated number of tigers remaining on Earth. The space in the middle would hold 40,000 of these tigers, equal to the global tiger population in 1970.

more images and other very interesting projects on Chris Jordan’s website

Also, watch the trailer of a powerful movie called Midway Journey :
“… a poetic, visual, and introspective journey to one of the most remote places on the planet.”

Midway Project blog, team details, photos, videos: www.MidwayJourney.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Midway-Journey/117981432917
Donate: www.razoo.com/story/MidwayJourney