Running the Numbers - An American Sel-Portrait

  • Thread starter Thread starter exigeracer
  • 4 comments
  • 336 views
Messages
5,987
I'd like to share this work more from a graphic or artistic perspective than a socio-political protest, as the original work is intended to be.

This is the work of Chris Jordan, who examines and portrays the overconsumption of Americans, in the form of collages of small photographs. They are assembled to visually show the vast scale of waste and overindulgences, showing the "big picture" of cell-phone use, cigarette addictions, paper use and others.

He describes it as:

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 a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

For example, this piece depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

Partial zoom

Detail at actual size


The rest of the collection can be viewed on his site:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

Again, I'm not trying to pick a fight or complain about anything, I just thought that it was interesting to see how these common statistics look visually.
 
That's an interesting and effective way of helping get your head around big numbers. A few years back I printed out 64 pages each of which had an eight inch square printed on it. Each square had a grid of lines spaced one sixteenth of an inch apart within it. I spread the sheets out on the living room floor so I could see them all at once. This enabled me to see what one million of something looked like. I'd originally got the idea from the book Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr.
 
USA
usa-satellite-d-01.jpg

Closeup
4.jpg
 
Back