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July 16, 2007
There's a message in these plastic bottles
BY DAVE SCHLECK
Americans go through 2 million in 5 minutes. Seattle photographer Chris Jordan wants you to be aware of that.
Chris Jordan's artwork depicts the 2 million plastic bottles used in the United States every five minutes.
That's a lot of bottles.
The Seattle photographer includes this work in his series, "Running the Numbers: An American Landscape," on display at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York City.
The size of the original "bottles" print is 5 by 10 feet.
Q: Where did you get the idea for "Plastic Bottles 2007"?
A: Our use of plastic bottles is a phenomenon that I've been wanting for some time to do a piece about. It is one of the most flagrantly wasteful and absurd things we're doing as a culture right now -- shipping billions of gallons of water from all over the world that isn't any better quality than the water we can get out of our taps.
Plastic bottles have become ubiquitous in our culture -- we each use more than 700 of them per year, and the phenomenon is spreading to other countries that don't even have the infrastructure to deal with it. I traveled to Portugal recently, and the dumpsters in the alleys are overflowing with plastic bottles. They pour down the storm drains and into the rivers and oceans.
Q: How many bottles did you start with for this artwork?
A: I had about 1,000 bottles that I picked up from the University of Washington recycling program. I dumped them in my driveway and photographed them over and over, stirring the pile with a rake between exposures. Once I had a few hundred photographs of the same bottles in different configurations, I began constructing the huge digital composite image in Photoshop.
Q: How long did it take?
A: About three weeks to take all the photos (including lots of testing to get the perspective right), and another few weeks stitching them together digitally into one big image.
Q: I don't want to count them. Are there really 2 million in the image?
A: It's very close to 2 million, within 1 percent. I knew how many bottles were in each image, and I kept careful track of how many images I was stitching together--which was more than two thousand. A few bottles got erased at the edges, but otherwise it's an accurate depiction of five minutes of our bottle consumption.
Q: What is your source for the statistic?
A: That one came from the Container Recycling Institute (container-recycling.org).
Q: What did you do with the bottles when you were done?
A: I packed them into six enormous bags and brought them to the curb for recycling. The recycling guys had a good laugh on pickup day-- they thought we must have had a really big party.
http://www.dailypress.com/features/lifestyle/cyberlife/dp-life-chrisjordan-bottles,0,1961988.story?coll=dp-features-cyberlife
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