Chris Jordan, Part I

I think that Jordan is successful in making us feel more intensely about these statistics through his photographs. He speaks about a phenomenon that I think we all encounter when we are faced by a shocking statistic, by a number so large that we cannot comprehend it. Furthermore, when we are faced with numbers like this so often, when we are constantly under this barrage of information, he is right in saying that we become numb to it. With his illustrations, he has found a way to translate these numbers to the individual, to personalize them to the viewer. This is a reality that we confront daily, I believe. For example, we might read in the newspaper of a young boy caught in the crossfire of a gang confrontation, and we can become emotionally involved, although we knew this boy no better than the thousands who constitute a statistic. Reading the article allows us to connect to the victim, to understand what has been lost. We might see that he loved strawberry ice cream and his dog Fritz, and we grieve for those who will miss him: his, mother, father, siblings, grandparents, friends at school. Strangely enough, if we saw a statistic that read 29,569 people are killed in gun-related deaths every year in the United States, it might give us relatively little pause. It seems then that our emotional response is almost inversely proportional to the numbers. I do not think, however, that this is out of calloussness or a lack of empathy, because we know that we can be deeply affected by another's misfortune. Rather, we simply cannot fathom such enormous numbers, cannot conceive of the sadness of so many mothers and fathers and friends. Thus, Jordan's work is so valuable because he represents each object or individual, every life that makes up a statistic, in his images, offering us a visual representation of a reality we previously could not imagine. These photographs depict the number of gun-related death in the U.S. in 2004. The first is the original image, which was printed on a canvas 60x92". The second shows detail at the actual size of the handguns.