Lachlan Sword
JR’s Inside Out Project
1) After the Paris Burning incident occurred in 2005, images that Jr had pasted of his friends a year earlier were stolen by the media and displayed on the news to show the criminals in the riots. He decided to take portraits of his friends with a 28mm lens and paste them all over the bourgeois areas of Paris. His intention was to take the images stolen by the media, re-own them and have his friends portray the characters given to them by the media. I believe this project was very effective because he eventually had them pasted on the walls of city hall and gained a lot of attention from the people of Paris and may have caused some people to change their perspective on the issue. Also, this is when he realized “the power of paper and glue”.
2) The series that effected me the most was the project in Rio De Janeiro. I have always wanted to travel to Rio because I am a soccer fanatic and love Brazilian culture. His project was on the issue of the teens being arrested by the army and mutilated and killed by one of the druglord’s gang in the favela because they didn’t obey curfew and didn’t have their documents on them. The fact that they teens who were killed relates to me and I can just imagine being involved in a scenario like this and the helplessness and resentment of the authorities I would feel. Jr decided to take portraits of some of the women relatives of the teens killed, pasted them in the favela’s of the city and entitled the piece “Women Are Heroes”. It also had great effect on the city because it gave women a sense of empowerment, brought the story of these adolescents to the media through the perspective of the women and in a pure and truthful way.
