Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.
Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.
Depicts 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004.
Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
That's a lot of cell phones...!