Black consumption

As you get close to photographer Chris Jordan´s photo installations you slowly see the meaning embedded within. It may well leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

While Chris Jordan has more recent work it is his 2007 and  2009 "Running the Numbers" series that have left a mark with me. With Chris Jordans photographic series “Running The Numbers” and "Running The Numbers II" he paints photographic images of the modern mass consumption. He turns statistics of mass consumption and mass culture that on their own seem abstract into very litteral visualisations that astound and appal in equal measures.

"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 U.S. 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 collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming."

Chris Jordan, Dog and Cat Collars, 2009, 60x67" (Depicts ten thousand dog and cat collars, equal to the average number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the United States every day.)

Chris Jordan, Dog and Cat Collars, detail

Chris Jordan, Dog and Cat Collars, detail

Chris Jordan, Handguns, 2007, 60x92" (Depicts 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004.)

Chris Jordan, Handguns,detail

Chris Jordan, Handguns,detail

Chris Jordan, Prison Uniforms, 2007. 10x23 feet in six vertical panels (Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world.)

Chris Jordan, Prison Uniforms, detail

Chris Jordan, Prison Uniforms, detail

Chris Jordan, Prison Uniforms, on exhibition

Chris Jordan, Valve Caps, 2006, 10x25 feet in five vertical panels, (Depicts 3.6 million tire valve caps, one for each new SUV sold in the US in 2004.)

Chris Jordan, Valve Caps, detail

Chris Jordan, Valve Caps, detail