I somehow missed this in my e-mails and want to kick myself, but I’ll hold back and hope that this is new to some of you. Some fresh new AMAZING work from JR in Kenya. A lot of us are comfortably numb the way we live our lives, just sitting around while the current of movement gushes by. JR is not one of said people. He’s always on the go, constantly looking for a place that he can help out, or touch the lives of others, and make aware that in fact there are others that share this world with us. He brings them in our living rooms, on our walls, project them on our houses, and put them on our buildings. He takes us out of our comfortably blinded positions and thrust his realistic blowned up images of everyday people in our faces. It’s like you have been an immobile Neo your whole life, and then one day Morpheus comes to you. JR is the Morpheus of the photography world.

I’m not leaving anything out, this will be a rather lengthy post, so brace yourself. Here’s some words about the movement:

Finally, more than a year after he took the original pictures, JR has returned to Kibera, Kenya. He was reunited with the women who had accepted to be part of the project at the end of 2007. Whilst some of them had had to leave the slum during the post election riots of 2008, others were still there and are now helping implement. The art performance will be ready for Friday 30 January 2009 and is taking place in the heart of Kibera, one of the largest slum of Africa.

2000 square meters of rooftops will be covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera. Most of the women will have their own photos on their own rooftop and for the first time the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. It will be interesting to see what other uses the photographs will be put to come the 31st January. Before that though, they will be on view from Google Earth and the railway line that passes above them.

Meanwhile the train that passes on this line through Kibera at least twice a day will be covered with eyes from the women that live below it. It will also be pasted with eyes of the women of Brazil, India, Cambodia, and other parts of Africa whose stories and image continue to travel. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces will be pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.

Yet more amazing pictures of the action here. JR’s Website.