Face2Face

The Face2Face project is beautiful and yet utterly daring in its simplicity: to take photographic portraits of Palistinians and Israelis in similar professions and post them in large format, face to face, in prominent places around Isreal and the Palestinian areas.

The result: a touching and powerful public message - that people can find a middle ground for tolerance and respect in the human face.

Seemingly every day we are bombarded with images of the Middle East which suggest irreconcilable conflict, a stand-off between fixed positions. Perhaps art can pose the question: why can't people just get along?

So often pressed into service in shock news, propaganda and warfare itself, can photography also be an art of peace?

The Face2Face project, and the film based on it, show us how the resources for solving conflicts - or for living with them in more human ways - lie not so much in deep insights about the human condition, but in the muscles of our own faces.

I found this film liberating, not just because of its carnivalisation of conflicts in the Middle East - conflicts that so often appear as inscrutable as they are intransigent - but also the way it made me more aware of the flexibility of the human face, and the capacity of the face to inspire new thought. 

Although the photos were placed side by side, passers-by were frequently unable to tell the faces apart, unable to separate the Arab face from the Jewish face in the moment of confusion that the human face can bring us to. 

Our faces reveal individualities - regardless of race and culture - that can't be closed in by dogma, fear or suspicion. These photographs allow individuals to express themselves through their laughter, eyes and infinite facial expressions.

As one Arab participant in the project remarks, 'our smile is something that can't be stolen from our face'.

These passionate portraits - funny, grotesque, touching, playful, vulnerable, absurd - show how people on both sides can work wonders with their own faces, laugh at themselves, and do it side by side.

Miraculously left alone by the authorities for the duration of the project, these huge billboard-sized photographs transform the locations in which they are placed.

Though the project organisers try to place art outside politics, there is a subtle politics behind this project. Moreover, the French street artist JR can get away with things that no Israeli or Palestinian could ever get away with in the current political climate.

On the other hand, these images can change the way that conflicts are seen and experienced around the world.