Intolerable Beauty
Portraits of American
Mass Consumption
2003-2005
chrisjordan.com
April 2007 | Insight Out
Statistics You Can See... And Feel
Chris Jordan gets very anxious when he photographs.
“When I come upon some incredible pile of garbage or the number of cell-phones that we waste, I get this urgent feeling that people have to know about this,” says Jordan, a Seattle-based photographer known for his large-scale images of mass consumption.
Since leaving his job as a corporate lawyer in 2003, Jordan has helped more people visually know the actual (and frightening) quantities of stuff consumed in America. Jordan brings statistics to life in his photographic art. His pieces (some as tall and wide as the side of a house) have been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2006, he published Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from An Unnatural Disaster, a book of photos taken in New Orleans at the end of 2005, which features essays by writers Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin.
“I am really interested in the cumulative effect of each of our individual consumer choices,” says Jordan. “The actual quantities of everything consumed in America are invisible to us. They are only a concept. The only way to relate to those concepts is through statistics.”
Jordan’s latest exhibit, Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait, includes colorful depictions of millions of bags, guns, cans and folded prison uniforms. Each exhibit is paired with a sobering statistic on American consumerism or simply the state of our culture today.
1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags: the number used in the US every hour
2.3 million folded prison uniforms: equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005
“[Statistics] go in one ear and out the other,” admits Jordan, who cites the statistic that 30,000 Americans commit suicide a year as an example. “That is unbelievably tragic,” he says. “But we don’t feel it.”
According to Jordan, we’re numb to statistics because they are fundamentally abstract and disconnected from any sense of feeling.
“My desire, is to take the information that resides at that unfeeling abstract end of the information continuum,” concludes Jordan, “And bring it further along to the space that we can feel and experience it on a more visceral level.”
To view more of Jordan’s work and see statistics instead of just read them, visit: chrisjordan.com — Ritzy Ryciak
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