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CHRIS JORDAN stood on a ladder, gazing down at 3,000 or so used cellphones in a pile on the warehouse floor. His 8 x 10 view camera was perched even higher, on a tripod 12 feet above them. He had spent the morning figuring out how to include every one of the phones in a single photograph, eventually sweeping them into a neat, trapezoidal-shaped mound, the shorter side closer to the camera, or what would be the bottom of the picture frame.

Mr. Jordan had flown from Seattle, where he lives, to photograph at CollectiveGood, an electronics recycling center in the Atlanta suburbs. "I want to give a concrete sense of our consumption, with the real quantities," Mr. Jordan said, from his perch on the ladder. Of course, for one image to represent the actual number of annually discarded cellphones - 130 million, according to CollectiveGood - he would have to reproduce the picture he was now getting ready to take about 43,000 times, creating a panorama that would stretch 61 miles if the photos were laid side by side.