Christopher Jordan, a former corporate attorney turned internationally acclaimed photographic artist and cultural activist, will deliver a talk at New York University on Wednesday, March 3 about his exploration of the frightening volume of waste generated by American consumerism.
Christopher Jordan, a former corporate attorney turned internationally acclaimed photographic artist and cultural activist, will deliver a talk at New York University on Wednesday, March 3 about his exploration of the frightening volume of waste generated by American consumerism.
The free presentation, sponsored by the NYU Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship as part of its 2009-10 “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century” speaker series, will take place from 12:30-2:00 p.m. at the NYU Kimmel Center, Room 914, at 60 Washington Square South, New York, N.Y.
Jordan’s artistic photographs render America’s hard-to-fathom statistics about consumption more comprehensible. For example, his “Running the Numbers” recreates George Seurat’s famous painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” an example of pointillism, using 106,000 aluminum cans—the total used in the U.S. every 30 seconds. Jordan’s evolving body of work invites the viewer to see every detail as a metaphor for the role of the individual in our hypermodern society.
For more information on seating availability for this and other upcoming talks in the 2009-10 “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century” speaker series, please visit the website.
About the NYU Reynolds Program
The Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship is designed to attract, encourage and train a new generation of leaders in public service. Each year, the program will expose a highly selective group of graduate and undergraduate students from throughout New York University to the cross-disciplinary skills, experiences and networking opportunities needed to advance and support their efforts to realize sustainable and scalable pattern-breaking solutions to society's most intractable problems. The innovative program is housed at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at NYU.
Running the Numbers An American Self-Portrait
Running the Numbers 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 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 roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008