This charming depiction of a female torso is not what it appears. The image is actually composed of 32.000 Barbie dolls, representing the 32, 000 breast augmentations performed on American women and girls every month.

Chris Jordan is a Seattle-based photographic artist known for his large-scale portraits of America's mass consumption and waste. He creates work that translates the massive, difficult-to-imagine numbers into tangible form. Through his lens abstract and anesthetizing statistics are brought shockingly to life.

Each one of Chris Jordan’s images portrays a specific quantity of something. Fifteen million sheets of office paper (representing five minutes of paper use), for example. 426,000 mobile phones (the number of handsets retired every day), one million stacked plastic cups (the number used on US airline flights every six hours), 28,000 42-gallon barrels (the amount of oil consumed every two minutes in the US - equal to the flow of a medium-sized river).

Like a magician Chris Jordan first conceals these everyday objects, then throws them in our face when we zoom in for a closer look. ‘I want people to realize that they matter,’ he says. ‘As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us. My hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.’

’