Running the Numbers

Maybe you’ve run across the imaginative, meticulous, numerically-oriented photographic works of Chris Jordan. But have you really SEEN them?

Here’s how he describes his site and project, 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. 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.

Click each image more than once. Go farther and farther into the picture. And farther into a relationship with the issues each reveals in the emulsion of your conscience. These images are not trivial gimmicks but true and valid “object lessons” about matters of consumption and health that matter. Or should.

Somehow this seems related. I had a conversation yesterday with someone I was getting to know. He spoke of an unearthly experience in the dessert that was for him a peak moment. I could tell it meant a great deal to him, that the sensory experience changed him, but he could not find the words to reproduce the experience in my mind. I understand.

Images can help us understand where words fail. Jordan’s photographs offer this translation that might move us closer to comprehension. And from time to time, a writer, too, will find the words that translate our own experiences into sentences we can share. There is, at least, that hope.