Thanks to the "cooks" in Nau's Thought Kitchen for reminding me of the sobering photo spread in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion Magazine. I was captivated by Orion's interview with photographer Chris Jordan, but didn't make the connection between Jordan's photos and the incredible statistics behind them

Indeed, the Thought Kitchen headline says it all: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Statistics!

In a nutshell, here's how Jordan describes the photo series titled Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait.

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.

Here are a couple of stunning examples of Jordan's work, followed by an inventory of some of the other statistics portrayed in Jordan's Running the Numbers photo series:

Cans Seurat
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Plastic Bottles, 2007
Depicts 2.5 million plastic bottles, the number used in the US every hour.

Other photo/stat pairs include:

Jet Trails
Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.

Cell Phones
Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Paper Bags
Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.

Plastic Bags
Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

Shipping Containers
Depicts 75,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every day.

Office Paper
Depicts 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes.

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