Quiet but mighty!

SOMETIMES I feel a bit helpless when it comes to campaigning for important changes in life.

There’s things I feel very strongly about of course, and I definitely believe that everyone - even on an individual basis - has the power to make a difference.

But a lot of the time it feels like the ability to make an important change sits in the hands of other people, who have the power to make the change.

Like Governments.

And yes, we all have the ability to campaign to push Governments to make the changes we feel are necessary, to make our voices heard. But on issues like the environment, it feels like changes we really care about aren't happening quickly enough and meanwhile we have to sit back and wonder what we can do to help make it happen faster.

One of the reasons I love writing so much is you get to explore different subjects and to get them talked about.

A good book, film, or TV show can explore subjects from lots of different characters' perspective.

Art is very much like that too, which is why artists and creatives are often the first to suffer under the hands of tyrannical, repressive Governments. Artists represent freedom of thought. They don't tend to think like other people. They don't follow the crowd. Which - if you're trying to get things done your way - can threaten people's sense of power and control.

Artists are often the quiet ones, challenging thoughts and preconceptions, sometimes in a strong and obvious way, but more often in a quiet, thought-provoking way.

They don't have to wave their fists or shout from rooftops. They don't hang out banners or wave their flags.

Instead they create beautiful images or words that make people stop and think.

This weekend, I went to see an exhibition at The Saatchi Gallery in London by French artist JR - who describes himself as a photograffeur (a merging of photography and graffiti artist). Having started his career as a graffiti writer on the streets of Paris, he later started taking photographs of communities, printing them out on giant strips of paper and pasting them up on buildings like giant murals.

He won the Ted Prize for 2011, and used the $100,000 award money for his Inside Out Project, giving a voice to local communities by interviewing them about important issues, photographing them, and creating giant murals for the streets where they live. The project, which is still active now, allows communities across the world to create their own campaign, by allowing groups of 50 people or more to create their statement in photographs which can then be pasted up within their community.

What I love about JR's work is how he allows communities and those he interviews to speak for themselves. He humanises important issues.

He has gone into prisons, and favelas; he's spoken to women who have been subjected to domestic violence; he's gone to the Mexican border and put up a giant-sized face of a cute toddler peering over the border between Mexico and America to remind people critical of immigration that immigrants have a face, and also a reason for wanting to change their life.

He spent time in both Israel and Palestine talking to, and taking photos, of people along with their profession and where they lived, posting people from both states - in both states - in order to humanise the faces of those living with the constant fighting.

Equally captivating was the living mural he did with Time Magazine - interviewing those for, and against, gun ownership in the US. He didn't glamorise anyone, or try and caricature those with more extreme views - which is what he could quite easily have done. Instead he videoed them and edited them all together, allowing you time to stand and take in all the faces behind the debate. A kind of living Harry Potter style human mural if you like.

In his documentary Faces Places there's no raised voices or shouting from rooftops. Instead, what there is, is a genuine love of people and a quest to tell their story.

His work is art with a message.

Which makes it all the more powerful because of it.

It's not a huge, loud, critical campaign.

Just beautiful pieces of work, with a simple - but clever - message attached.

Campaigns don't need to be loud and combatitive. Sometimes the more powerful ones are just Quiet but Mighty.

What kind of change maker are you?

Loud and Combatitive or Quiet but Mighty?

** JR's exhibition - JR: CHRONICLES - at the Saatchi Gallery, London, runs until October 3rd and features some of his most iconic projects from the past fifteen years.