Missives

thesmithian:

…what sets this work apart is the life the portraits acquire after they are taken. For French “urban artivist,” JR… photographs are only the beginning of the creative process. Working with a huge team…he pastes enormous posters of the captured images in public spaces all over the world—on the walls of churches and mosques, the sides of buses, trains, favela walls and stairwells, on the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Sometimes the person pictured has an intimate relationship with the location; one woman he met had escaped a life sifting through rubbish in an acrid dump on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. She took him back there to show him it, and eventually allowed her photographed eyes to be pasted to the side of a rubbish truck, so that her gaze now looks out at the life she left behind.

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