Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
(Applause)
Thank you.
Indeed, last March,
I found myself with a heavy load on my hands:
I had to make a wish to change the world.
I don't know if you've ever been in that situation,
but usually you don't know where to start,
and it can't be done in a year.
I am going to show you what happened
in the last eight months,
when we had to -- our team was quite large already --
to turn everything inside out.
We've had to say that we won't be able to go pasting up around the world
so we're going to need everybody's help.
And this is how it starts:
(Music)
you go on a website,
you upload your portrait.
You just have to be within the frame of the portrait.
You upload your photo
and you put up a statement to go with it.
That is, basically, the message you want
to be going with your photo.
So people -- money for my school,
a bicycle lane on my street,
and we print it.
We set up a printing house,
we print it, fold it, put it in an envelope,
and we send it to you,
wherever you are in the world,
and we do it for free if you can't pay for it.
So people end up with this photo,
and I find myself as a printer.
We explain to them how to make the glue,
it's very simple, a little flour and sugar,
and the posters go to places
where we never set foot,
with people we never met
and who have their own impact.
(Music)
So you will tell me --
(Applause)
Thank you.
That trailer was made 6 months ago,
I'm going to show you what's happened since then,
and how it's happened.
Because, I confess, when I came into that printing house I was thinking,
OK, I'll stop travelling,
I will print for people.
I give you everything, my technique,
how to do it. Go and do it yourselves.
The first one who responded
a few days after I gave my talk,
at TED in the USA,
it was Tunisia.
There was still an air of revolution floating,
and I received hundreds of photos.
I looked at them, they were all well-composed,
complying with the project rule.
We sent them over there,
and Tunisians replaced
all Ben Ali's portraits around the country
with their photos.
(Applause)
At that moment, I thought,
that's how I can step back from my projects,
because I could never have done it for them.
I could have not gone there to replace Ben Ali's portrait.
I am not Tunisian, it's not my history, it's not my country,
but for them, it was an adventure.
I talked to many of them,
and that was quite something.
Actually, they expected their project
to be solely about covering Ben Ali's portraits,
but in fact hundreds of problems surfaced.
Some didn't want to see women on the walls,
some didn't understand what it was about,
most of the posters were torn off every morning.
And I saw them cry, I saw them laugh,
I saw them discover their people
in the street, and I told them,
Don't you feel like it's a failure?
Seeing your posters torn off all around the town?
They told me: "No, that man came to see us,
an old man, and he told us,
"You have the right to put up these photos,
but they have the right to rip them off.
That's what we call democracy,
and we've just found it."
The project kept on travelling.
That was in Pakistan. I've never been there,
I don't know these people,
they defended their cause, they put up the photos themselves,
they took their own risks.
That was in Berlin, but they did it in Russia too,
to fight against homophobia,
and some went to prison
for marching in the street with their poster.
Unexpectedly, this same piece of paper,
this poster we're talking about,
this piece of paper of 1.40 by 0.90 m
can become a work of art
in one part of the world,
a political object in another.
A few months later,
hundreds of thousands of people
went into the streets of Russia.
Somehow, their project revealed
some cracks in society.
It was interesting, because I thought,
it actually went wrong over there.
Strangely enough, nothing bad came out of it.
Here, the garbage collectors in Montevideo,
had posted up their own pictures...
They said, no, no, no,
your photos, they're too small, we want to make them bigger.
So they printed them themselves,
they found the technique and they copied it
and they made their project.
In North Dakota,
Native Americans set up a huge project:
they said, we are still here,
we're at the center of the United States,
and they covered their reservation with their photos.
They had a huge impact,
and that's when I realized
that actually, when I made a project,
I would have a local impact,
with global consequences.
Because I'm French, the French media
or foreign media would talk about it.
When they made their project over there, they got that local impact.
They addressed their community
and the people around the whole North Dakota area
since they made it to the cover of Fargo.
Eventually, that connection is the strength of Inside Out,
because they would only communicate about their message.
There is nothing but their faces
on these posters, no other message,
and when - right now I'm in New York -
when I was given some walls at first,
telling me, "Here, you want to put up some photos?"
I thought, right now,
I'm not being very productive,
I haven't made a lot of portraits lately,
however, the project the Native Americans
did touch me deeply,
and I would like to blow them up in the town.
Right now, those are the portraits
you can see in large format in New York.
So we set up automatic photo booths.
Those photo booths, you may have seen one at the Centre Pompidou,
there was another in Arles,
recently there was one at the Galerie Perrotin,
but there was one in Abu Dhabi,
around the world, in the Near-East ...
you get inside, it takes your picture,
30 seconds later, you go away with your poster.
I must confess that here in Paris,
it was interesting, at the Centre Pompidou, we talked with people,
we interviewed them,
"So why are you having your picture taken?"
"Because it's free, we go away with our poster!"
Others said, "Well, no, JR, I don't even know who he is,
I saw people waiting in line, I joined them..."
So everyday,
there was a 3 1/2 hour line at the Centre Pompidou,
we printed 24,000 photos that just went away,
some at the other end of the world,
some were posted up in Paris.
But actually, most of them ended up
framed in people's living rooms.
In France, we may have less things to fight for,
I don't know, anyway, that's interesting.
This project is like a reflection of our society.
Though when we set up photo booths
in Isalel and Palestine,
and each person getting inside the booth
would sign for a peace involving two states,
then it attracted crowds.
And people used these photos,
That's the biggest march ever in Israel's history,
the Occupy movement, 150,000 people in the street at the beginning of September,
all the leaders of the march were holding their photos
rather than messages.
I mean, knowing that those photos will remain engraved in the country's history,
when people look at history books,
then maybe the photo booth in Israel
at that moment had a different goal.
On the other side, in Palestine, that's in Naplouse,
whole roofs were covered,
building fronts. In a way,
I had done it before over there,
in 2007 with a small team,
But nothing can beat watching people
doing it by themselves within their community.
In New York, in the Bronx, the men decided to take pictures of women,
to cut out their eyes, to hold them, to photograph themselves again,
and to post up everywhere in the Bronx.
That's a really meaningful project,
and as I was in New York at that time,
I thought, I'll go and see.
I'll go and see them, support them.
While going up to the Bronx,
there were a lot of media watching them,
it was attracting a lot of attention,
and then they told me, "Come and help us post up!"
I went to help, and that's when I understood I didn't belong there.
As soon as I arrived, the media said,
"Hello, JR, so, this is your new project!
What is it, you photographed..."
Despite my explanations, the next day in the New York Times
it was still JR who's made a new project in the Bronx.
That's when I understood that,
well, I belonged in the printing shop,
at least on that project.
Another project that touched me deeply was the one in Juarez.
That was last December.
We make that kind of projects, involving people.
You may remember Saint-Louis island, in Paris.
Hundreds of volunteers would come every day,
we didn't know them and they would post up.
Here in Juarez, the Border between Mexico and the USA,
they posted up thousands of portraits.
It means hundreds of people doing it.
It means getting organized:
who takes the buckets, who makes the glue,
and production, my accomplice Emile is here, we can tell you,
it's not that simple and it requires a lot of energy.
Those people did it, they set it up by themselves,
and they got a huge impact, that's what makes me want
to keep this project going.
Today, this project goes on,
it has no end date, it depends on you,
who wants to join in, who wants to organize some action,
can post up on a large scale, and who knows
where it will take us.
It may change the world,
or not,
but the question remains, can art change the world?
Thank you.
(Applause)