+ Interview with Chris Jordan

The very talented photographer/artist/environmental activist Chris Jordan graciously took some time out of his busy schedule to speak with us today. His amazing photographic pieces visualize the statistics of contemporary American culture. His images depict things like the number of shipping containers that go through American ports every day (75 000) or the number of disposable batteries produced by Energizer every 15 min (170 000).

TGG: How did you get started with your Running the Numbers series?

Chris: Running the Numbers was an outgrowth of a previous project I did called Intolerable Beauty. What I did with Intolerable Beauty was basically straight photography. I would go out with a large format film camera and look for huge piles of detritus of our mass culture. As I got to the end of my Intolerable Beauty series I was looking for where to go next with it and I realized that the straight photographic process that I was using had some limitations that I wanted to try to overcome. The whole idea behind my intolerable Beauty series was to try and depict the scale of our mass culture, our consumerism. I realized that I really wasn’t depicting scale. I was taking these scary photographs and I was trying to depict the scale but the actual scale was something that was invisible because there was no way that you could go and take pictures of all of the cars we discard in a day or all the cell phones that we discard every day or all the oil that we burn every day. So it occurred to me to try to make these digital composite images that depict the actual quantities rather than just showing some random amount of garbage and hoping that that would have enough of an effect.

TGG: What kind of feedback have you gotten on this series?

Chris: It's just been astonishing what has happened. The public response to my Running the Numbers series has been amazing. I just can’t even believe what has happened to me in the last year and a half since I released this series. I've gotten tens of thousands of emails from all over the world and my work has been featured on hundreds and hundreds of blogs and in magazines. It has just received this truly amazing public response. What I really attribute it to is not so much that I am some brilliant artist, because there is lots of amazing work being done out there that isn't receiving this kind of attention, but I think what it is reflective of a craving on the part of our culture for just a more sensible way of being. For me, the metaphor that I carry in my mind is that American culture, or consumer culture else ware in the world, is like a giant frat party. It's 4am and everyone has been drinking bad alcohol for the whole night and we are all laying around in pools of our own vomit. There is just this deep voice that we can all hear, way down there that says – OK, it's time to do something different. We are messing our own selves up as well as the resources of our planet.

TGG: Consumerism and consumption is a pretty hot topics right now, what do you think makes your work so effective at making a statement?

Chris: I don't know how well I accomplish it, but one thing that I think is really important is to be self reflective. I try to make my work not judgmental. When I talk about my work, I do it in a way that isn’t finger pointing at anybody because it doesn't take much self reflection on my own part to realize that I'm in no position to be a preacher. If I just look around my studio I have all kinds of nice stuff and I fly around the country on jets to give talks about global warming. There is a tremendous amount of irony in my own life that if I think about that, I’m in no position at all to point the finger at anybody and say somebody is being bad by consuming. That is one aspect that is really important to me

Another aspect is that I think it is really important, is to honor the complexity of these issues. I remember years ago I did some environmental activism work around nuclear power plants. I was one of those people back in collage that chained myself to fences and that kind of stuff. I realized that I had a very one dimensional view of it back then. I wasn't thinking of the irony. That I'm against nuclear power but I'm also against the kind of pollution that comes from the alternatives and I'm also a guy who uses a lot of electricity myself. When you start looking at issues like that, they are so complex. I think that is an aspect of the environmental movement and generally about political activism that needs to be brought up to date. That is a part of my work that is important to me also.

TGG: As a designer, I really appreciate the visualization aspect of your work. A number doesn’t always mean something to someone but to see it blow out into an image that represents what that number means is really effective.

Chris: That's kind of the underlying idea behind my Running the Numbers series. It's to take these statistics about our mass culture and translate them from the unfeeling cold, clinical language of data that we can’t feel. Numbers pass in and out of our minds every day. We read all these statistics about the number of unwanted dogs and cats that are euthanized every day or the number of people that are dying around the world, they are just these giant numbers. It could be a number like 200 million or 200 billion, it really doesn’t matter. It's just some giant number that we don't have the ability to comprehend. What I try to do is to take those numbers and to translate the number from a dry unfeeling statistic into a visual that carries a feeling with it.

TGG: The Greener Grass is focusing on Energy. Your recent piece, entitled Energizer, is particularly relevant to some of the things we are discussing. How did you choose Energizer batteries as one of your subjects?

Chris: I got an email from a guy who said, have you ever thought of doing a piece about about recycling batteries. I had actually just gone over to the University of Washington and got a whole stack of all different kinds of household batteries. I was about to do a piece on household batteries in general and this guy wrote me an email. He had written to Energizer to see if they had a program to recycle household batteries. They wrote him back and said, since their batteries don't contain mercury any more, they didn’t think it was necessary to recycle them. Then he wrote Energizer back again and asked how many batteries aren’t being recycled and they sent him the annual report showing the numbers. When he sent me the numbers, I just thought, well how much metal is that? I did the math and it was just astonished to discover how many batteries that one company produces. I haven't heard from energizer. I keep expecting to get a letter from their legal department. The thing I would say to them is – I’m not going after Energizer specifically. They are no worse then Duracell or Sony or Panasonic, or any of the other companies that make batteries. Those companies produce them and we consume them in just the same quantities. That was just an example.

TGG: You have done the hard work of raising this awareness. Do you have an messages or advice for us who are product designers? What we can do to start fixing the problem? How can we start carrying that awareness into a solution?

Chris: Wow - that's an amazing question. I do have a thought, but it might be kind of a different thought than you might expect. I think that this revolution can only happen inside the heart of each of us. What I mean by that is, if there is a person out there who is a product designer, and they are doing work where they are participating in the creation of products that are environmentally bad, then that person, every day that they go to work, there is this little bit of a bad feeling that they have in their heart from the work that they are doing. I know that, because I was a corporate lawyer for many years and I did that exact kind of work. The work that was directly contrary to the idea of being a passionate and connected human. I had that feeling every single day. I got a nice pay check out of it, I thought that was worth it. I'm only realizing now, later in my life, that the amount of money that I was making and the material benefits that I was getting in my life was far outweighed by the eternal sickness that I was experiencing from doing something that I didn’t believe in. If I was talking to a huge group of people who are product designers, I would say, make the decision internally to just be a person who lives by your principals. If that means you have to go work at a different company or if that means you have to go in and chew out your boss and say - I demand that we change our practices - then if you do those things, it will be difficult and scary and emotionally hard and there will be anxiety involved but you will experience a new sense of well being that will totally change your life. That is how the green revolution is happening. All these people are saying - I am going to be the person who lives by my principals. I just want to see what it's like to be a vegetarian because I know that eating meat is one of the most environmentally destructive things that we can do, and so on. Every single time someone makes one of those little decisions the whole world heals a little bit.

For more information about Chris Jordan and his work, visit his website at www.chrisjordan.com.