Chris Jordan – Running the Numbers: An American Portrait
Chris Jordan started 2007 with a new photographic series that lenses contemporary American Culture via the absurdity of some very American statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption), 61,000 Hummer logos (equal to number of Hummers sold in 2005), 2.3 million Americans in prison or a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war. Jordan portrays these statistics by incorporating them visually in a large intricately detailed photographic prints assembled from thousands of smaller images. You may have seen this kind of imagery before but most likely not in this context. Such images have a more profound and lasting effect than the abstract and disconnected feel of the raw numbers alone.
Visit Chris Jordan Photography to see more of this and other works. This latest series is still in its early stages and new images will be posted on his site as they are completed. He is currently exhibiting some of his work at the Tufts University Art Gallery.
Pictured above left, "Denali Denial" depicts 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales in 2004. Above right is a full-size details of the far left corner of the lake.
