Chris Jordan’s project “Running the Numbers” hits my weak spot for data visu­al­i­sa­tion. The artist about his project:

This new series looks at con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture through the aus­tere lens of sta­tis­tics. Each image por­trays a spe­cific quan­tity of some­thing: fif­teen mil­lion sheets of office paper (five min­utes of paper use); 106,000 alu­minum cans (thirty sec­onds of can con­sump­tion) and so on. My hope is that images rep­re­sent­ing these quan­ti­ties might have a dif­fer­ent effect than the raw num­bers alone, such as we find daily in arti­cles and books. Sta­tis­tics can feel abstract and anes­thetiz­ing, making it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with and make mean­ing of 3.6 mil­lion SUV sales in one year, for exam­ple, or 2.3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visu­ally exam­ines these vast and bizarre mea­sures of our soci­ety, in large intri­cately detailed prints assem­bled from thou­sands of smaller photographs.

See for your­self at www.​chrisjor​dan.com.