The Thompson Family

Ran across this today and wanted to share. Very cool art by Chris Jordan that, in the words of Anna Hecker from Threeminds, "makes a statement about American consumption and spending that’s a little more than just 'cool' and 'fun'. The way the pieces look has been considered as carefully as the messages they portray, and the artist allows the numbers to speak for themselves rather than flinging preachy messages at the viewer. It’s a simple, clever way to convey a lot of difficult information with an image and just a few words."

This new 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 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

~cj, January 2007