The Physical Facebook is such a beautiful, compelling story on so many levels.
Giving people our society generally ignores a face. It shouts we are human, we have community.
It speaks to me photographically. About the power of the photograph with it’s innate ability to share who we are with an immediacy, an intimacy like no other.
The photographer, James Galwey, a Montreal outreach worker with Exeko, sums it up best when he says,
“it’s a way for these people to keep in contact with themselves… they live, they exist, they breathe.. in a way the photographs are proof of their existence. I don’t want these people to be forgotten.”
We’ve been recording who we are since we began drawing in caves. Photography, our truly democratic medium, opens up the potential for us all to be recorded, to be remembered – recorded proof of our existence.
Photography also has the flexibility to cross demographics speaking to us equally wherever we are from no matter our skin colour, our language or our religious affiliation.
How fantastic, what potential!
This story speaks to the value of the print. Watch how one gentleman speaks about how content he looks as he shares a print of himself. The pure joy of that moment where he sees himself and physically shares it.
Keep recording your world, sharing your vision, yourselves. Let’s build bridges together, grow communities moving together as humans in a most humane way.
Additional power lies in the printed photograph like that drawing on the cave wall. We are physical creatures and having something we can touch and feel adds another dimension the digital realm, with all its charm and stretch, just doesn’t quite emulate.