An Eye for Detail

Will Richardson kindly tipped my attention cap towards the work of big-format photographer, Chris Jordan, earlier today.  Haven't been able to shake his mind-bending images since.

A photographer, yes.  But something far richer than that.  Especially if you are a believer in the evolving need to be able to 'tell engaging stories' inside the land of complex, data-dense, statistical landscapes without falling prey to pain-in-the-eye spreadsheets and 1-D pie graphs. 

Using massive scale photographs in the "Running the Numbers" series, Jordan manages to take something really hard to grasp -- say the "contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics" -- and turns your eye his way hard-n-fast. 

Like much of the design-centric data visualization examples that Dan Meyer has been doggedly drawing his teaching colleagues' attention to over the last year or more -- take Feltron's annual reports, for instance -- Jordan's photos turn spreadsheets into eye candy.

An example? 

Well, let's say you wanted to talk to your students about the rapid onslaught of plastic water bottle usage in our country...and what impact it might have if you're really serious about recylcing. Sure, you could say to your kids,

"Hey, kids, did you know that 2 million plastic water bottles are used EVERY 5 MINUTES in the United States?!  No?  You didn't?  Sounds like a lot, huh?  But how much is 2 million every 5 minutes?  Okay...everyone take out their notebook while I get my pie chart up on the board."

Or you could show your students the following series of photos:

2 million botttles at 60x120":

2 million bottles at partial zoom:

2 million bottles detail at actual size:

This -- I believe -- is something our students will get with a capital 'G'.  And they'll crave more, as many as you can get a hold of!

I'm dying to show the entire series here, but if you're curious you only have to jump over to Jordan's site and look for the "Running the Numbers" collection.

I do, however, want to share 3 photos from another one of his collections that he entitled, "In Katrina's Wake".  A healthy reminder of how good 99.9% of us have it no matter what our complaints may be in the middle of the school week:

Comments

[Louise Maine]

Thanks for sharing this! Pictures speak louder than words and will be useful in my environmental class!

[Shaun Fletcher]

These photos are amazing. So many environmental issues facing our world can be concretely represented and analyzed with photos such as these. I'd like to see his display in a gallery! When I had shown these photo series to my students last year, there jaws dropped and really did not believe they were real numbers. It's just as mind blowing for adults. It makes you wonder where all this stuff goes and how most of our consumption and waste is out of sight and out of mind.

[A. Mercer]

I used the cigarette one for Red Ribbon Week, to add some visual pizzaz:
http://oakridgefourthgrade.edublogs.org/2007/10/24/assignment-8b/

[One of Mr. Long's students]

The airplane picture reminds me of what [student name removed by Mr. Long] taught me and [student name removed by Mr. Long] about streamlines. It's so cool!

***

Mr. Long's response:

So pleased that you like these examples. He's an amazing artist, to be sure, and he definitely opens our minds to new ways of seeing very complicated data-based concepts.