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Photographer Chris Jordan - Running the Numbers

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Photo of Chris Jordan photographerBill Moyers interviewed photographer Chris Jordan on the PBS show "Bill Moyers' Journal" last night.

A long-time photographer, Jordan once took a photo of some garbage that he was surprised to find many people described as "beautiful". This response lead Jordan down a path that ultimately arrived at his "Running the Numbers" series of photographs that visually represents the statistics surrounding American's consumption and social ills. Jordan builds his photographs like pointillist composites using repetitions of the subject matter.

If you didn't get to see the show, you can view it online here: Chris Jordan Running the Numbers Interview with Bill Moyers. Well worth the 10 minutes, in which Jordan demonstrates he is not only a great photographic artist but also incredibly articulate.

And here's an example of Chris's work taken from his website http://www.chrisjordan.com/. This piece depicts the 106,000 aluminum cans used in the U.S. every THIRTY SECONDS! OMG! In this piece seen in its totality, it resembles a work by the impressionist painter Seurat. Partial and full zooms show how the photograph is composed. My mind boggles to think how long it took Jordan to compose this artwork.


Cans Seurat, 2007 by Chris Jordan
Cans Seurat, 2007 by Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan Cans Seurat at partial zoom

Chris Jordan Cans Seurat at full zoom
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Cool Granny Has Taken Up Flying — The Little Old Lady Collection Grows Again

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Cool Granny in Her Biplane — © John Corney 2026 Our cool granny is back, and she has done something the family has been quietly worried about for a few months now. She has taken up flying. A Brief Recap for New Readers If you're new to the series: she first appeared in a beautifully kept yellow Austin A35 on the corner of Queen Street and K Road in Auckland , waving cheerfully out the driver's window as she went past. That piece was, in its quiet way, a tribute to my own mother, who in her fifties bought her own motor scooter in Whanganui and never looked back — and to every older woman who has ever decided it was finally her turn. Then she showed up in a pink-and-yellow flame-painted monster truck, waving out the driver's window in exactly the same spirit, but with rather larger tyres. Same silver hair, same coral scarf, same oversized sunglasses. Same little red heart pa...
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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