I've been a fan of JR for the past few years. First time I came in contact with his work was the "28 millimeters" project, born out of the French ghettos. A project that continues to this day into a multifaceted discourse about conflict and privation all over the world. JR talks about a closeness of photography, "...they signed into the project...expressed their feeling. with a 28 mm lens you are 10 cm from the subject." This idea that you see these images blown up, huge, the size of billboards. You can't avoid them, they are not small, they are not to remain quite, but they are not selling you anything either. However you can buy into empathy, if you so choose to. The barriers of language and culture are always distorted through mass media. If you were to limit your sources of information to popular news stations, your view of reality would become rather skewed, and tunneled.