An American Self-Portrait
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 responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
[ Several new images coming soon; and my apologies for the slow-loading website. In a few weeks these JPEGs will have a cool zooming function, using Microsoft's new SeaDragon technology. Please stay tuned! ~cj, December 2008 ].
IN A NUTSHELL, THIS PROJECT IS REALLY RAD! Here's a teaser of one of the full images and it's progressive stages of zoom BUT you should definitely check out the slow-loading website too!
Light Bulbs, 2008
72x96" (The displays are massive!)
Depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.).
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