Photographer Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers project contains some fascinating images. I particularly like "Barbie Dolls" because it creates a recognizable image at the "forest" level that ties directly into the statistic being cited. "Plastic Bottles" also creates a compelling image of a "sea" of bottles that is lacking in similar pieces like "Cell Phones" or "Paper Cups". I also like "Cans Seurat" for re-creating a familiar image, but there's no particular reason why /this/ particular image should arise from these particular materials, so it's less captivating than "Barbie Dolls".
The series as a whole would be more powerful, I think, if there was some attempt at common scale to the pieces. Part of the artist's "hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone", but even in images it's impossible to compare the impact of one million plastic cups used every six hours versus 8 million trees harvested every month versus 426,000 cell phones retired every day. How do we know whether these images/statistics are big or normal without anything with which to compare them?
Still and all, a great experiment.
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