Elegantly Wasted...

Chris Jordan is a visual artist from Seattle, WA:

"Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something [...] 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 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. 

"This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming." 

Depicts 32,000 Barbie dolls, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006.