Inside Out In Times Square...

For the past couple of weeks Times Square has been taken over by mystery-man street artist JR as part of his on going Inside Out project.

The Inside Out project has been going on for a couple of years all over the world, JR and his team have been taking beautiful, simple black and white photos of people in different communities and pasting them up in the surrounding areas. From Brazil to Africa, they've been celebrating the people who make those places so special.

JR won the TED prize for his work - and he gave a brilliant talk explaining what he does and why he does it (it's worth a watch if you've got time - click here).

So to coincide with the release of his Inside Out Documentary, JR took over Times Square, parking his photo-booth truck by the big red stairs and offering free, HUGE, black and white portraits of people.

(This isn't my photo, I nabbed it from Google Images)

So you go and sit in the back of the truck and pull a funny face, then a minute later a huge 3x4 foot poster size image of your face prints out of the slot in the side of the truck!

(I nabbed this from Google Images too)
Then you take your big face and paste it on the pavement, here's a picture of the man himself, JR, pasting his face down...

(This one's definitely not my photo!)

Then, when they ran out of floor space, they started pasting up on the walls...

 (Thank you Google Images)
At 11.57pm each night Times Square was COMPLETELY taken over with black and white faces as the Inside Out project took over all of the huge TV screens too. So for 3 minutes each night all the adverts disappeared and were replaced with smiling faces instead.

Abi and I made a few attempts to get our photos taken, we went up to Times Square on 3 different occasions - the first two we got there and we were told that they weren't accepting any more people that night, then we thought we'd try going at lunchtime one day - big mistake - the queue was huuuuuuuge!

So, unfortunately we didn't manage to get our faces plastered all over Times Square (we'd carefully planned the faces we'd pull and everything!), but we did enjoy seeing Times Square filled with smiling and silly faces, and seeing everyone having so much fun with the project...

 I've loved seeing bits and pieces of JR's work all over New York, and watching the TED talk and hearing about the message behind it all is great too.

 I can't wait to see the documentary now.