Well I missed Earth Day, but it is never too late to enter into the spirit of going green. Here are some powerful images by Chris Jordan that relate to the statistics of consumption & help us to recognize the extent of the problem.
This series 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 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
The series begins with an image of 1 million plastic cups – the number used on US airlines every 6 hours.
View the rest of the series here, and thanks to Anneke Geel for making me aware of this
Filed under: art, consumerism, creation care, environment, life, photography, sustainable living Tagged: | art, Chris Jordan, consumerism, Earth Day, environment, life, photography, sustainable living
