Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers

Plastic Bags, 2007 (detail at actual size) Digital C print, 72″ x 86″ by Chris Jordan

I often try to wrap my mind around how big the world is. It’s a simplistic statement, I know. It’s an avenue of inquiry I can trace back to being very very young and sitting in the backseat of the car, en route to my grandmother’s house, watching airplanes taking off from Kennedy and rumbling above us over the expressway. I can’t think of another moment that more clearly defined the smallness of me in relation to everything I was surrounded by – the cars, the people in the cars, the miles of freeway, the people in the planes, the places they were going, and all of our stuff.

These days I think about it a lot in terms of what we consume and throw away, somewhat in the context of my obligatory liberal eco-guilty, but some of it because I am in awe of the vastness of a world that consumes and contains all we’re creating, not to mention that which has been created that we have nothing to do with. (Like, uh, nature and stuff.)

I contemplate nearly every plastic bag I use (and preferably reuse) in this context. And I feel guilty about takeout containers (it was a bad scene when I was home sick for more than a while ago). I am amazed at the untidy rows of huge contract bags that line my sidewalks on Friday nights, when walking the dog with one of those bags-to-be-reused in hand.

Chris Jordan’s photographs provide snapshots of what our, specifically American, consumption looks like, and makes it that much harder for me to visualize in way because the vastness of the tableaux he constructs represent only the smallest fractions of our output. The photo above is depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds. His constructions are reminiscent of Tara Donovan, but their intent and message is vastly different.

(link via Design Observer)