By Larry Ossei-Mensah
For nearly a decade, French Street artist JR has made the walls of cities around the world his personal canvas and the streets his public art gallery. Emerging from the graffiti culture and transiting into a modern day Henri Cartier-Bresson with his larger than life photographers of people who dwell in these cities, JR has become the voice for the common man. Plastering these large format images via “pasting” everywhere the eye can see, JR’s vivid tableaux has made him an icon of his generation. After winning the TED Prize in 2011, JR was asked to make a wish. His wish was to create the world’s largest participatory art project and that moment sparked the genesis of the InsideOut Project.
The InsideOut Project is a global platform for individuals to share their stories and create transformative messages into iconographic works of public art. People email their portraits to JR, he prints them and sends back 36” x 53” posters empowering individuals with the tools to tell their story via public art. JR shared that, “I believe in re-empowering and not imposing.” Over 130,000 people from 108 countries have contributed images, helping the InsideOut Project to transform neighborhoods from Tunisia to Israel into jumping points for dynamic dialogue.
Throughout the project, JR and filmmaker Alastair Siddons have been documenting this experience in a riveting piece of cinema – Inside Out: The People’s Art Project. For a majority of the film, JR facilitates moving conversations showcasing slivers of insights from the lives that have been impacted by the InsideOut Project. “That is what this whole thing is about,” says JR, “It is not just about creating a cool photo. It is about reconnecting people.”
Last month during the Tribeca Film Festival, where the documentary premiered to a star studded audience that included festival co-founder Robert DeNiro, JR brought the Inside Out Project to New York City. Taking over Time Square for nearly three weeks and inviting people to take portraits that were instantly printed from his mobile photobooth and pasted in Father Duffy Square, it was a delight to see the smiles on the faces of participants seeking to share a memorable experience. JR shares, “I want people to walk away from this film with the desire of making something. I want people to re-create an interaction by making an action ‘InsideOut.’”
Inside Out: The People’s Art Project documentary, directed by Alastair Siddons, premieres this week on HBO.
Photo credit: Naplouse, Palestine, 2011 / © JR
