Chance on the road

Of Faces Places — the notes give the Korean title as 바르다가 사랑한 얼굴들 — the writer first takes up what Agnès says about the value of chance. Agnès and JR, they write, concentrated on chance in their work. Passing a miner village that was falling apart, they met the old man who still kept it; passing a goat farm, they met a proprietor who, though not strictly rational, kept his own creed and went on with livestock farming; in a dock town they heard not the men at the center of port work, but their wives.

Faces printed large, and put on walls

So Agnès and JR listen to the people they have met by chance, print large photographs of their faces, and attach them to walls. The photographs that are born on those walls become, the writer says, works of art too beautiful — in scale as well as in art — to be called merely chance.

A homage, not chance alone

Watching the film, the writer wonders whether the value of Agnès and JR’s work can really be settled by the word chance alone. The dictionary sense of chance is an event without causal relation, happening unexpectedly. But their work also makes a clear result. In the three cases already given, putting the face of the last keeper of the miner village, and the miners’ images, on the wall is a showing of homage and respect for the years they had lived. The notes leave the film at that respect. The same Korean report sits on CampusDown, written out more fully.

Sources

1. The notes, a student viewing of Faces Places: Agnès and JR attending to chance, a miner village and a goat farm and dock-town wives, large faces on walls, and a homage to the years the miners had lived.

Last updated: 15 November 2026