The Face2Face Project
 Undercover photographer "JR" stages provocative "open space photo galleries" in urban areas. Marked by towering, black-and-white portraits, these installations are almost always illegal. (Hence, the anonymous moniker "JR.") But that hasn't stopped the guerrilla shutterbug from drawing large crowds and laudatory responses from critics and photo sites.
In March, JR launched an ambitious project in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Using a fish-eye lens, he captured comic, bulbous-nosed images of Israelis and Palestinians who share the same profession. He and his partner then posted the photographs "face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides." They dubbed it The Face2Face Project. We wrote about the companion site for Face2Face the week the installation went up in Israel. We were curious, though, what this street artist, famed for his brash, in-your-face images, thinks about the Web, which reduces his pictures to screen size and removes the viewer from the inner-city confines he prefers. When we wrote him to find out, he told us that the answer resides in what the Web does best: getting the word out... Hey JR, how do you see your web sites—your personal one and the one for Face2Face—helping or interacting with your work, which is so physical in its scale and on-the-street display? The work I do in the street is ephemeral, so the only way to keep a mark is through the Internet and books... Also, I can share it with millions of people who will probably never see it in the street. But I still think that the reality is much stronger and that the best (experience) is to see the real pieces on the wall rather than on your computer screen... We know there was a big response to the Face2Face project. Did people respond to the site, too? Yes! So many emails (came in) that the forward of the book has been given to all the people who reacted to the project through the web site... good and bad critics, we took them all! Is there anything that surprises you about running the site for Face2Face or your personal site? I put a photo each day on the front page of my web site and there is an artist who sends me drawing of the photos that inspire him... sometime he sends me the drawing 15 minutes after I update the page! Now, that's close attention! Thanks for the great work, JR. We'll be following online until we can hit an exhibit in person.
| 
