Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait

by Chris Jordan

Startling digital photographs paint a disturbing yet strangely seductive picture of American life today.

Genres: Art

111 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Photographer
http://www.chrisjordan.com/books/

Librarian Note: There are several authors in the GoodReads database with this name.

Mystery writer Chris Jordan
Pastor Chris Jordan

Reviews

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This exhibition-related book holds up well almost 10 years later. The social and political statements remain relevant. The technique (using large numbers of small objects) remains impressive. We are constantly showered with statistics (gun deaths, plastic ocean, etc.) but these images confront us differently.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"My idea with the Running the Numbers series is to...give you the statistic in a different way that allows the viewer to experience the number more directly with their heart. One of the huge problems that faces our society right now is that...our consumerism, and the resulting global warming, worldwide environmental destruction, the toxification of our oceans, and the desertification of our agricultural lands, and so on, are not happening because there's an extremely bad person out there who is doing a huge amount of terrible consuming. This is happening because of the tiny incremental harm that every single one of us is doing as an individual. The problem is this cumulative effect from the behaviors of hundreds of millions of individuals. Each person looks around at his or her own behavior, and it doesn't look all that bad. What we each have to expand our consciousness to hold is that the cumulative effect of hundreds of millions of individual consumer decisions is causing the worldwide destruction of our environment."

"Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: thirty seconds of our aluminum can consumption, eight hours of commercial jet flights, and so on. My hope is that images representing these statistics might have a different effect than the raw numbers we encounter daily in books, magazines, and the news. Statistics about our mass culture can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it hard to connect with the profoundly important issues the represent.
Finding meaning in these huge numbers is made even more difficult by the fact that there is nowhere we can go to see the actual phenomena--the millions of barrels of oil we burn daily, or the eleven hundred Americans who die every day from smoking cigarettes, or all the children in our country who lack health insurance. They are spread across our nation in an invisible collective that is impossible to experience in any way other than by rows of numbers with lots of zeros, written on a page.
In this way, I think of Running the Numbers as a kind of translation, from the deadening language of statistics into a more universal visual language that might allow for more feeling. The underlying aim is to question our roles and responsibilities as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming."