Recently, French artist JR (whom Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about here) took over The New Yorker’s Instagram feed to document his new large-scale participatory art project, ‘Inside Out‘.

JR and his team opened a specially designed photo booth in New York’s Times Square, a location which attracts some 400,000 daily visitors. He invited passersby to take self-portraits and then he printed three-by-four-foot black-and-white versions of the resulting photo booth images and pasted them to the ground in various locations.

The goal of the project was to allow each portrait-taker to express through his or her face a message to the world.

Of his project, JR says:

When people ask me, ‘What’s the point of all this?,’ I just respond, ‘Real interaction.’ How may times a day or a year do you interact with people you don’t know, participating in something with no direct goal, and using the walls of your own city? People interact on social media everyday, but one of the main goals of ‘Inside Out’ was also to create that exchange in real life.

If you’d like to know more, check out the following trailer: