Chris Jordan.

Not to totally gank this post from Katy Elliott's today, but it was too good not to pass on to my 4 or 5 readers. This is the remarkable artwork of Chris Jordan, who creates an interesting perspective on the consumer usage of our normal every day products as well as our societies behaviors*. For example this first image "Depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.)."

You have to click on the link to see this in different views. It's incredible.


This next one shows, upon zooming in, "83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration's war on terror." Man. I don't know what to say about that.


This image is made up of the tops of cigarette packages. "200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months."



What is super cool is the various perspectives drawn from the images. For example the image above "Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world."

Honestly what I think brings it home is seeing these things from varying degrees of zoom. As a mass they look like patterned wallpapers, until you get in there and see what's actually creating them. And THEN realizing what these individual items stand for is something else altogether.

Don't hesitate to browse through Chris Jordan's website. If ONLY ONE of these speaks to you, well, that will be something.

*Please click on the link. These mere examples don't even begin to illustrate what he's done with the various topics he's investigated.