Chris Jordan keeps his eyes open for staggering statistics, and the more alarming the better. What sets his 44-year-old heart racing is some new figure expressing American excess and neglect—the number of disposable batteries manufactured by Energizer every year (6 billion) or plastic beverage bottles used every five minutes (2 million) or children without health insurance (9 million). Think of him as the unofficial artist of the Harper’s Index. 

The puzzlelike photographs he makes in response to these big numbers are designed to illustrate “the scale of consumption of 300 million people” and what such rampant profligacy, if unchecked, might mean for the future of the planet. He has completed 19 pieces for the sardonic series he calls "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait," and he has more in the works. (View Jordan's photographs.)

Figuring out how to translate what he calls the emotionless sums he finds in his research into visual metaphors that read on two levels is the challenge—a piece needs to be legible as one thing from afar and another up close. He recently finished a work dramatizing the 200,000 Americans who die every six months from smoking cigarettes. As you move toward the 6-by-8⅙-foot print of a smoking skull—a macabre image lifted from Van Gogh—you realize it’s as pixelated as a JPEG or a Chuck Close painting, with the kicker being that the portrait is composed of 200,000 cigarette packs. “When you stand back, you behold the collective, the forest,” Jordan says. “But as you step closer, you see that it’s made up only of individual trees. What I’m trying to suggest is that every individual matters. Our vote does count. If we do bad stuff, it does count.”

After 10 years as a Seattle lawyer, Jordan opted out in 2003 to try his hand at large-format photography. He says one of his inspirations was Powers of Ten, the micro-macro picture of the universe by Charles and Ray Eames; another was staring at images from Google Earth. Despite his late start, he’s doing well: His work is among the holdings of numerous museums and more than 100 private collectors.

The scale of his imagination is often defeated by the scale of what is feasible as a photograph. He has started a piece on the number of bullets fired in Iraq since the war began. But he calculates that even if he makes each bullet one-twelfth of an inch around, the work will have to be 60 feet high and 6,000 feet long. He would love to do a composition about oil or coal. “They deserve to be addressed brilliantly,” he says. “But so far, nothing I’ve come up with honors the depth or complexity of the problem.” Of course, as an industrial process dependent on chemicals and wood pulp, photography itself leaves a deep toxic footprint. “It’s a question that I wrestle with,” he says, sounding contrite. “It’s hard to be a green advocate when I realize how deeply I’m implicated. But if I’m an alcoholic, we’re all alcoholics. I’m like the guy who wakes up and asks, ‘Hey, has anyone noticed the pile of empty vodka bottles in the corner?’ ”