Artist Chris Jordan assembled a digital image called ‘Toxic Forest’ which is exactly so—it is composed of individual, high-resolution photos of hundreds of cigarette butts that he gathered from various places around Austin and Seattle.
After photographing them, he digitally multiplied them to the exact number of 139,000, which statistics show as being the number of cigarettes that are smoked and discarded every 15 seconds in the US.
This project was commissioned by Legacy in a bid to broadcast the harmful effects of this toxic waste on the environment and ecosystem.
‘Toxic Forest’ is part of Jordan’s bigger project titled ‘Running the Numbers’, where he explores contemporary American culture through a visual interpretation of statistics. View the series on his website.
[via Chris Jordan and The Atlantic Cities]