Reference Publications

Running the numbers: an American Self-Portrait

Liberal Education, Summer, 2009 by Chris Jordan

EDITOR'S NOTE: The images printed below are part of a larger series entitled Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, which was presented by the photographer during the opening night forum at the 2009 annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. To learn more about Chris Jordan's work and to view the complete series, visit www.chrisjordan.com.

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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 United States 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 responsibilities we each play as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Oil Barrels, 2008 (right)

Depicts twenty-eight thousand forty-two-gallon barrels, the amount of oil consumed in the United States every two minutes (equal to the flow of a medium-sized river).

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CHRIS JORDAN is a photographer based in Seattle, Washington. He is the recipient of the 2007 Green Leaf Award from the United Nations Environmental Programme. In 2008, his work was short listed for the first annual Prix Pictet, the world's premier photographic award in sustainability.