We live in a society of mass consumption where everything seems to be disposable, causing one of the worst problems of our time, the huge amount of garbage produced by us and thrown away in the ocean or other areas every day. Chris Jordan, has been using this subject in some his photography exhibitions, alerting us to how terrible we have been treating our planet.

Chris photos are incredible and in his Running the Numbers II Portraits of global mass culture exhibition, each image portrays a specific quantity of something: the number of tuna fished from the world's oceans every fifteen minutes, for example. But this time the statistics are global in scale, rather than specifically American.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

We highly recommend that you visit Chris' website (http://www.chrisjordan.com) and take a closer look at his photos, they are incredible but show us how bad we are with our world.

Gyre, 2009

8x11 feet, in three vertical panels

Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.

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Shark Teeth, 2009

64x94"; based on a watercolor painting by Sarah Waller

Depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day for their fins.

Photos from other Exhibitions

Cell phones #2, Atlanta 2005

Cell phone chargers, Atlanta 2004

Spent bullet casings, 2005

Container yard #2, Seattle 2004

About the author

My name is Fabio Sasso, I'm a graphic/web designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil and I'm the founder of Abduzeedo. I hope we can share lots of information, tips, and ideas through Abduzeedo. Also you can follow me on Twitter or my personal site at http://fabiosasso.com.

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