Photographers: January 2007 Archives

Over the weekend, I ran across a del.icio.us link to Chris Jordan's latest work, Running the Numbers. The work is a series of photomosaics designed to illustrate large-number statistics about American culture, such as the number of prison inmates or daily consumption of office paper. At first, I was pleased to see Jordan begin to carve out a space for himself that did not rely on (unfavorable) comparisons to Edward Burtynsky, but the more I mulled it over, the more I realized Jordan's attempts to build artistic cred lead him to stray into the worst sort of shallow, kneejerk political art. Particularly offensive is "Jeep Liberty", two wide red swatches unmistakedly mimicking the Twin Towers, made up of 200,000 tiny Jeep Liberty SUVs, the number sold each year in the US since they were introduced in 2002 (according to Jordan). Another, a mosais representation of Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte made up of soda cans is a heads scratcher, mostly just a visual stunt with little or no underlying meaning. If he's been able to make any point, it's only that statistics, like photography, have limited rhetorical power when displayed alone and stripped of their context.

I'm sure it'll be a big hit.

I just ran across the video of Edward Burtynsky's lecture/acceptance speech for his 2005 TED award. It runs 30 minutes. (The embedded video didn't seem to work, so you have to head over to the TED site.)