JR’s “Women Are Heroes” in KiberaNOWNESS, Louis Vuitton’s culture website Tweeted JR’s “Women Are Heroes” project just now, featuring photos from Kibera, located in Nairobi, Kenya.

We’ve written extensively about this inspiring, global project and only recently connected it to Jonas Bendiksen’s widely-read stories at Anne of Carversville: ‘The Places We Live”: Four Monumental Slums Typify ‘Home’ for More than One Billion People.

Bendiksen photographs Kibera from another angle than JR.

We found ourselves in Kibera for another reason, wanting to learn more about the so-called “flying toilets” of Kibera. If you require translation, a “flying toilet” consists of human waste put into a plastic bag and tossed into the air, landing on roads or in gutters.

The photographs of both JR and Jonas Bendiksen bring the “flying toilets” of Kibera into sharp focus.

JR’s “Women Are Heroes in Kibera”

JR “Women are Heroes” Kibera, Kenya, Jan. 2009In Tucson last year, it was so divine not seeing any billboards. But JR’s “art” is an entirely different subject.

This crazy Tunisian, eastern European hybrid Monsieur JR “photograffeur”, who pastes enormous black-and-white photographic canvases in various urban environments, owns more than his fair share of my brain cells.

Remarking that there is no art in slums … he makes some, aggrandising local people into larger-than-life characters, then papers, plasters and hammers his photos on everything in sight: buildings, roofs, trains, bridges — even in Paris.

JR visited Kibera in 2008 to take photographs of its residents. Now women of Kibera are having their Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame, thanks to his vision “Women Are Heroes”.

He returned in 2009 after the mayhem of the election riots (mayhem is putting it mildly), to plaster their portraits on train carriages and on the roofs of their houses.