An American Self-Portrait

Running the Numbers-An American Self-Portrait by Chris Jordan

As I put it to my new friend Meri after she passed this along, "Good art is a reflection of light and shadow, literally and figuratively. This artist certainly has a grasp of our shadow." These are visuals of the staggering statistics of consumption in our culture. (The image is a visual representation of the number of cell phones retired in the US DAILY.)



From the artist's website:

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.