July 7, 2008


Chris Jordan – Running the Numbers

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.

This is a detail of Shipping Containers, a print that depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours.

posted by Amy Mabli in photography 

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4 Responses to “Chris Jordan – Running the Numbers”

  1. Sean Salmon on July 7th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    I really love his work. Thanks for posting it.

  2. Daryl Scroggins on July 7th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    I like the way this image looks, at first, like an old patch-work quilt that the baby shits on and is then put away in a trunk. Then the scale of it takes over–and it still seems odd that so many pastel colors would appear in such a collection.

  3. Amy Mabli on July 7th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    I love his work too. it’s disturbing and beautiful.

    I never thought about the pastel colors before. Maybe they start out more vivid and weather and fade with the ocean air? They’re similar to box cars in how you can see a few of them in a row and their colors work so well together, but you know no one grouped them by color deliberately.

  4. Mike D. on July 7th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    Amy, I got the same sense of unease when I first saw this. “That much shit…oh my.”

    But. I recently heard the final tally of the first U.S. census, in 1790: 3,929,214. That’s a lot of discarded pottery, a lot of old broken barrels, a lot of timber cleared for farmland. And that was at the turn of the 19th century!

    I think there’s a natural sort of unease that comes from taking a god’s-eye (gods’-eye?) view of the world. When I ride in a plane, looking down from 40,000 feet, I’m always struck by the same thought: I was never meant to see this. My ape genes were made for the view from trees, 30 meters at the most.

    What’s even more profoundly disturbing, is how these prints combine the large scale macro view with the minutia of daily life. The quantity of office paper, tossed out aluminum cans. I think of that 40,000 foot view, but instead of a patchwork of farm an civilzation, seeing it with unblinking resolution, every discarded item, every used sheet of paper. Increased distance naturally results in decreased resolution. This…it jus’ t’ain’t natural.

    By the way, I love riding in planes, and this.

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