Via Boing Boing: “Chris Jordan renders American consumer statistics as art. For instance: above, 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day. At left, an idea of what the 60 x 100″ piece looks like from a distance; at right, detail view.”

How do you negotiate the concepts and ideas behind your photographs, and any attempt to create or find beauty through your work?

That’s a very interesting question. At the very beginning of my Intolerable Beauty series, I had this idea that the images had to be beautiful in order for people to be interested in them. I thought that if I made an ugly image, no one would want to see it. If I can make a beautiful image of a difficult subject then the beauty will draw the viewer in and they’ll spend some time with the beauty part and the message will sort of seep in. I went with that notion for the longest time, but part of what got me started on Running the Numbers is that when I would show my work, especially the Intolerable Beauty series, all people would talk about was how beautiful it was. I found that the beauty was actually getting in the way of the message I was trying to convey.
ked to that image and they were talking about how beautiful it was.

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Personally, I find it beautiful, in the manner of schooling fish.