Street Art and the Power of Photography

Women, the heart of a town.

Women Are Heroes, 2009.

Jean-René, widely known as JR, is a French Parisian photographer, graffiti artist, and activist born in 1983. He is known for making artistic pieces which contain political messages, often displayed in public spaces as a way of making them widely accessible to the public and giving them notable visibility which serves to spread the message communicated through his artwork.

 

  

 

Women Are Heroes was a project made by JR which consisted of numerous installations of oversized black and white portraits of women pasted on buildings and structures specifically located in areas where political and economic struggles were, and still are, prevalent. For example, a part of the installation we’re going to be focusing on today will be the one located in the slum of Kibera in Kenya.

 

 

JR's focus on women and the emplacement of his installations are not unintentional, especially considering how the artist is known for using his work as a tool for activism. Women Are Heroes is a project aiming to bring into light women's constant vulnerability, and by extension their resilience, all while pointing out the different ways political and economic crises affect them specifically. As such, choosing Kibera, considered one of the biggest slums in Africa, as an emplacement for his commentary on the treatment of women, is an intentional way of highlighting these women's struggles as victims of poverty as well as victims of misogyny.

 

 

 

The thing that immediately attracted me to the installation is the content of the prints itself. As human beings, we are biologically encoded to socialize as a way to maximize survival. As a result, our gaze automatically deviates towards the eyes of the person we're looking at, which is why a lot of people believe maintaining eye contact is a fundamental part of human interaction. Eye contact proves that we are listening and that we are being listened to and, as such, seeing and being seen is a way to validate one's human dignity within a social group.

 

 

Various elements about JR's artwork have made it deeply striking to me. I initially thought that the choice for a monochrome color palette was an unconventional one. I've always personally preferred drawn art over photography, and as a result, I've been taught that colors are an efficient way of attracting people's attention to a specific part of a painting. For a while, I've found this theory to be true, until I laid my eyes on the photographer's work. The prints' lack of colors makes them massively stand out from the colorful green landscape in such a way that it actually manages to make us question the location of the installation as well. The two sections of the pictures deeply complement each other because the location of the installation is just as much a part of JR's work as the printed portraits.

 

Furthermore, the colors, or lack thereof, remind me of advertisements I'm sure most of us have gotten used to by now. As I mentioned previously, bright colors often serve to attract people's attention as much as possible which is also the core purpose of advertisement nowadays. And, as we know, women are very often at the center of those colorful advertisements, specifically young beautiful women. 

 

Indeed, seeing JR's installations depicting real women living in a deeply impoverished town through a grounded monochrome color palette reminded me of how deeply common the sight of women used as a marketing tool to sell and advertise has become in my day-to-day life.

 

This constant distorted depiction of womanhood used as a mere tactic for sales has, in a way, disfigured my perception of feminine beauty. The depiction of the female body is often a violent sight for me, because to me, feminine beauty doesn't really "embellish" the person shown on the billboards but instead robs them of their humanity by using their body as advertisement. There isn't anything wrong with enjoying someone's aesthetic beauty but equating someone's appearance to a sales pitch is bound to affect the ways in which we think of women's bodies and how we tend to treat them like commodities.

While JR's work tackles a wide variety of topics such as feminism, human nature, community, poverty, equality, discrimination and maybe even climate change, I think it is clear to a lot of people that the core message of this man's artwork is a message of hope. Initially, I was a bit wary of Women Are Heroes specifically because of the title. To me, the title felt like it was celebrating women's "strength" while simultaneously romanticizing their suffering the same way people would sometimes call black women "strong" without acknowledging that these women shouldn't have to be "strong" in order to exist. The fact that these women are living in poverty, are victims of physical, emotional, and sexual assault daily all while being the cornerstone of their own community is not something that should be celebrated because these women shouldn't have to go through so much to begin with.

 

However, after taking a step back and thinking about this project more thoroughly, I realized I tended to associate feminism with women's suffering. When I think about feminist commentary, feminist artwork, feminist poetry, etcetera, I expect to see, hear or think about the never-ending, universal, agonizing horrors women have to go through for simply being women. 

 

In a way, Women Are Heroes feels like a breath of fresh air because, while we cannot deny that suffering, poverty and warfare still remain and that there's likely very little we can do to solve these issues in our lifetime. It is still important to remember that in order to deal with the aforementioned problems, we have to at least believe that these issues can be solved. And this belief manifests through hope which is something we are taught to think of as foolish and useless.