The Effects of Denial

Artist and photographer Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics -- like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day. We use 40,000,000 cups every day, mostly for hot beverages.

He makes large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about "stuff" and what we consume. His 2003-05 series Intolerable Beauty examines the hypnotic allure of it all: cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods. His 2005 book In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster is a chilling look at the toll of the storm. And his latest series of photographs, "Running the Numbers," gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like "We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes" become a chilling, viewable reality. This past April, Jordan traveled around the world with National Geographic as an international eco-ambassador for Earth Day 2008. This is his speech from the last Ted conference.



Via my dear friend Elizabeth Boyle.