Numbing Numbers

I found this video of photographer Chris Jordan:

He’s a photographer who graphically represents some pretty stunning and sobering phenomena: the number of plastic cups used daily on airplanes, the number of people in prison in US prisons, the number of breast augmentation surgeries in a given year. And so on. His photos try to capture the phenomena in interesting ways — taking a picture of 2.3 million prison uniforms, or however many plastic cups, and so on and so forth. The photos are beautiful and the project, overall, is quite clever, and asks a really old question: how do we show what seems unshowable?

But strangely, despite his pronouncement that there’s a “strange anesthesia” in America about these phenomenon, I couldn’t help but feel the numbers wash over me — 2.3 million, 4.7 billion, 230,000 — as if the sheer number of numbers was more numbing than everything else.