JR in Kenya ~ Women are Heros

On the plane back from NYC I read about a French-artist JR, who had produced a public art project in an effort to honor the residents of one of the world's largest ghetto's- the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is best known for his technique of photographing inhabitants of a city or other area & pasting the resulting imagery up on grand scale around the community.



He has just completed something similar in Kibera, Kenya. This time, 2000 square meters of rooftops have been covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera. PLEASE click here to see a movie of it and you get the impact of the project. The still photographs below give you an overview but the movie is INCREDIBLE!
With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces have been pasted on sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. With this, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete whenever the train passes.



The Times online magazine stated in a recent article 'the trade in JR's pictures, created in third world slums and bought by affluent westerners, is reinvested in the slums, this makes him a robin hood figure'.



What a way to transform the world.