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I just came across the work of Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based artist whose “Running the Numbers” project visualizes statistics from and comments on American life. Jordan’s large, detailed prints, made up of smaller images, give a true sense of the quantities he represents. It’s worth taking a look through the collection on his site. He includes detail shots which give a nice sense of the composition. Here’s a small sample:

Office Paper, 2007. 60×87″:Depicts 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes.

Shipping Containers, 2007. 60×120″: Depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours.

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.