Image courtesy of Chris Jordan
Running the Numbers: An American Portrait is an excellent series of works. From his site…
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.
I strongly suggest you check out the other work on his site. I don’t always get into “conscious” artwork, but I like the message of Jordan’s work. Plus, he has an eye for the aesthetic as well. I’m totally drawn into the amount of each “something” in each print. As he mentions in his site, I think these would be better seen close up. Above, I’m only showing the detail of a 60″ x 90″ print. Regardless, it is worth the extra clicks.
