CHRIS JORDAN PORTRAITS: SEEING THE NUMBERS

I did a post on my other blog on this same subject, but decided to write on it here, too, because it blew my mind so much, and the more people see this, the better we may all be.
Chris Jordan is a very talented artist, and he uses his skills to take on some of the big social issues of our day and demonstrate to us what the numbers really look like, for example, when we hear that Americans use 28,000 42-gallon barrels of oil every TWO MINUTES. In this photo, each can of oil represents one 42 gallon barrel, and there are literally 28,000 cans in the photo (that is equal to the flow of a medium-sized river):


Each of these 100,000,000 toothpicks represents one of the

one hundred million trees cut down each year just to make the

paper for junk mail. Just junk mail.






These depict 2.3 million folded prison uniforms. This is not the number of prisoners in America. This is merely the number of prisoners that were convicted in 2005 (when Jordan was gathering his info and supplies for this photo). It may not surprise some people to know that the US has the largest prison system in the world.












Depicts 2 million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the United States every 5 minutes.






Depicts 170,000 disposable Energizer batteries, equal to 15 minutes of Energizer battery production. (The 1st pic is the detail at actual print size.)






If 170,000 real batteries were shown at their real size, the print of this photo would need to be
26 x 43 feet. That's for only 15 minutes. That's just the Energizer brand statistics -doesn't include any other battery brands. And these are disposables only, not rechargeable batteries that have finally died completely.



To depict one year of only Energizer disposable battery production - which is 6 billion batteries (6,000,000,000), at actual battery size, it would take a banner 26 ft high (as this one is) by 146 miles long.

This last image is built up of lines of text, made up of the names of 1 million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture.





To see more of Jordan's work, as well as appearance locations and dates, check out his site at www.chrisjordan.com