Running the Numbers - Chris Jordan Photographs Mass Consumption

Startling digital photographs paint a disturbing yet strangely seductive picture of American life today. The new book Running the Numbers: An American Self-portrait by Chris Jordan provides an amazing visual impression of our mass consumption culture. Jordan's online gallery Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption has additional images that reflects on our consumer world.

Statistics can be daunting and dry: 1,000,000 trees cut down every year; 9,000,000 American children without health insurance; 2,000,000 plastic bottles used every five minutes; 2,300,000 adults incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Renowned photographer Chris Jordan brings these staggering numbers to life in manipulated digital photographs that are at once alluring and shocking. A landscape of toothpicks, each representing a felled tree, stretches into the horizon; a looping maze of plastic cups reveal how many are used each day on airplane flights; fashioned from soda cans, a replica of a Seurat masterpiece becomes a lesson in waste; and thousands of Barbie dolls—representing the number of breast augmentations performed each year—combine to depict a woman’s torso. Filled with astonishing photographs of surprising beauty, this book, manufactured from recycled materials, helps us grasp visually the potential consequences of our culture of waste.

Oil barrels (2008)
Depicts 28,000 42-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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Light Bulbs (2008)
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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