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Chris Jordan photos: powerful/beautiful argument for public data
By WDavidStephenson | May 25, 2008
Welcome from Oberlin Ahia (couldn’t resist that: my father’s people were from southern Ahia, north of Cincinnata south of Klumbus, and several hundred miles west of Warshington. Folks up here don’t seem to share that accent).
While here for my stepson’s graduation, stopped by the college’s Allen Museum to see the exhibit of works by photographer Chris Jordan, from his “Running the Numbers” collection.
IMHO, Jordan’s work is a phenomenal argument for the power of public data and visual interpretation of that data as a means to make dry statistics — in this case ones critical to understanding the impacts of things as varied as plastic bag use and spending on That War, come alive and involve the public in debate over these issues.
As the catalogue states:
“Chris Jordan’s photographs investigate contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. The themes of environmental stewardship, mass consumption, waste, public health and social justice are explored through haunting, large-scale images, which cause the viewer to directly confront numbers through a visual medium. Each work portrays a specific quantity of a particular item: 15 million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use), 426,000 cell phones (the number retired every day), 106,000 aluminum cans (30 second of consumption). As Jordan plays with size and scale in these vast photographs, assembled from thousands of smaller ones, he also causes us to examine our role, responses, opinions and actions as members of a consumer society and as inhabitants of both a man-made and natural world. Images representing the quantities involved have a different and more powerful lasting effect than the raw numbers alone, which can often be mind-numbing and feel remote from daily life. As Jordan has stated, ‘Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing…this project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible and overwhelming.’”
You’d better believe it, Chris!
The one that really impressed me is his “Benjamin Franklin” shown here. Look at the 3 panels, totaling 8.5′ x 10′ and you see a nice portrait of Franklin. Get up close and personal, and you realize that it’s made up of minute photo images of 125,000 $100 dollar (Franklins) bills: the amount that the US spends hourly in Iraq.
Some people may find the National Priorities Project’s tradeoff calculator (my congressional district’s share of FY 2007 Iraq spending, $424 million, would have covered health insurance for 127,103 people), or some may prefer Jordan’s artistry: the bottom line is that when the people have access to critical data, they can help all of us understand it better and force us to examine whether we should change things.
Bravo, Chris Jordan. Hope you’ll let me use some of these images in my presentations to the Personal Democracy Forum and at Netroots Nation.
Now back to “Gaudeamus Igitur”
Topics: policy and politics, e-gov transformation | |
