Sherry Chandler

Running the numbers

A issue or so back, a columnist in our local weekly The Bourbon County Citizen opined that he saw no real reason to get exercised about global warming because it hadn’t been that many years since scientists were crying “The sky is falling” about population growth and, as far as he could see, we really weren’t ass-deep in babies.

It occurred to me to wonder if the columnist, whose name I’m sorry to say I don’t remember*, ever stopped to consider that we might have global warming precisely because there are now so many of us. In the United States, for example, a baby is born every 8 seconds. And the world population was 6,634,149,467 when I first started typing this. Check out the U.S. Census Bureau population clocks for the current numbers.

As a graphic illustration of how many of us there now are and how much we consume, a Seattle photographer named Chris Jordan has done an exhibit called Running the Numbers, which:

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.

Take for example his “Cans Seurat,” a 5 x 7.5 foot reproduction shown in miniature below with a detail:

I suggest you visit the web site to view his other works made from cell phones, vicodin pills, and hand guns (29,569, the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004). Although Jordan suggests that the images are best seen full-sized:

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.

You’ll find a list of exhibits and speaking engagements on the web, along with shots from two other series “Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption” and “In Katrina’s Wake, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster.”

Thanks to Donna Rhae Marder for the link.

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