JR (artist)

JR (; born 22 February 1983) is the pseudonym of a French photographer and street artist whose identity is unconfirmed. Describing himself as a "photograffeur" (a portmanteau of "photographer" and "graffeur"French for "graffiti artist"), he flyposts large black-and-white photographic images in public locations. He states that the street is "the largest art gallery in the world." He started out on the streets of Paris. JR's work "often challenges widely held preconceptions and the reductive images propagated by advertising and the media."
JR's work combines art and action, and deals with commitment, freedom, identity and limits. He has been introduced by Fabrice Bousteau as: "the one we already call the Cartier-Bresson of the 21st century". On 20 October 2010, JR won the TED Prize for 2011. He used the $100,000 award money to start the "Inside Out Project".
JR was included in "Time" magazine's "100 Most Influential People of 2018."
Life and career.
JR began his career as a teenage graffiti artist who was by his own admission not interested in changing the world, but in making his mark on public space and society. His graffiti efforts often targeted precarious places like rooftops and subway trains, and he enjoyed the adventure of going to and painting in these spaces. After finding a camera in the Paris Metro, JR and his friends began to document the act of his graffiti painting. At the age of 17, he began applying photocopies of these photographs to outdoor walls, creating illegal 'sidewalk gallery exhibitions'.
JR later travelled throughout Europe to meet other people whose mode of artistic expression involved the use of outdoor walls. Then, he began wondering about the vertical limits, the walls and the façades that structure cities. After observing the people he met and listening to their message, JR pasted their portraits up in the streets and basements and on the roof tops of Paris.
Between 2004 and 2006, JR created "Portraits of a Generation", portraits of young people from the housing projects around Paris that he exhibited in huge format. This illegal project became official when the City of Paris put JR's photos up on buildings. At the beginning of his projects, JR wanted to bring art into the street: "In the street, we reach people who never go to museums." In 2005, JR began pasting photographs of individuals from Les Bosquets on the walls of Paris to rectify the unbalanced coverage and representation of the people in the epicentre of the French riots that year.
In 2007, with Marco, JR put up enormous photos of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities on either side of the Separation Barrier. Upon his return to Paris, he pasted these portraits up in the capital. For the artist, this artistic act is first and foremost a human project: "The heroes of the project are all those who, on both sides of the wall, allowed me to paste the portraits on their houses."
In 2008, JR undertook an international tour for "Women Are Heroes", a project in which he highlights the dignity of women who are often targets during conflicts.
On 20 October 2010, JR won the TED Prize for 2011. He used the $100,000 award money to start the "Inside Out Project", a global art initiative that has allowed thousands of people around the world to speak to their communities through portraits pasted in public space. This prize brought him and his work to New York City where he opened another studio, and inspired pastings in the area such as those done in 2011 of members of the Lakota Native American Tribe from North Dakota.
In 2013, he continued working in New York City, with the "Inside Out Project" in Times Square, which challenged advertising with a massive work of art consisting of thousands of portraits of locals and tourists.
In January 2014, JR collaborated with the New York City Ballet for their second annual Art Series program, by exhibiting work in the theatre in Lincoln Center, including an interactive piece on the floor of the promenade. This collaboration led JR to explore the artistic medium of choreography in another project with the ballet months later. In March 2014, JR created an installation with 4,000 faces in and on the Pantheon in Paris. In August 2014, JR was invited to work in the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island, an important chapter in the history of immigration.
In 2015, he directed the short movie ELLIS, starring Robert De Niro. The movie, set in the abandoned Ellis Island Hospital complex and using JR's UNFRAMED art installations, tells the forgotten story of the immigrants who built America.
In 2016, JR was invited by the Louvre and made I.M. Pei's famous glass pyramid disappear through a surprising anamorphosis. That year, he also worked on his "Giants" series in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympics, creating new gigantic sculptural installations at the scale of the city, depicting competing athletes in action, supported by scaffolding. His work putting an emphasis on the beauty of the athletic movement. His latest projects include a museum exhibition dedicated to children at Centre Pompidou, a permanent collaboration with the Brazilian artists Os Gemeos at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in a space used to store stolen pianos during World War II, a gigantic installation at the US-Mexico border fence, and a film, "Faces Places," co-directed with Agnès Varda, travelling around France to meet people and discuss their visions.
JR calls himself an "urban artivist", he creates pervasive art that he puts up on the buildings in the Paris area projects, on the walls of the Middle East, on the broken bridges of Africa or in the favelas of Brazil. During the pasting phase, community members take part in the artistic process. In Brazil, for example, children became artists for a week. In these artistic acts, no scene separates the actors from the spectators.
After having exhibited in the cities from which JR's subjects came, the photos traveled from New York to Berlin, Amsterdam to Paris As JR remains anonymous and does not frame his huge portraits, he leaves a space for an encounter between a subject/protagonist and a passerby/interpreter, and this is the essence of his work.
In 2018, JR partnered with "Time" magazine, to produce their cover story, featuring over two hundred Americans who have been impacted by guns, including "hunters and activists, teachers and police officers, parents and children", to produce "Guns in America"—a talking mural—on one of the most polarizing issues in the United States today. JR filmed the 245 contributors in three selected cities, Dallas, St. Louis, Missouri, and Washington, D.C.. The November 5, 2018 "Time" cover is a collage of those individuals, whose profiles become a gateway to 245 unique stories.
In March 2019, JR again reimagined the Louvre pyramid in a 3D optical illusion. He used his iconic black and white stickers to make it appear as if the pyramid continued underground in an excavated crater. It was left in shreds within a day as visitors walked across it. JR embraced its short duration and even said that brevity had been his intent. He stated on Twitter: "The images, like life, are ephemeral. Once pasted, the art piece lives on its own. The sun dries the light glue and with every step, people tear pieces of the fragile paper. The process is all about participation of volunteers, visitors, and souvenir catchers."
JR is well known for his works with a humanistic approach that portray social realities. In November 2019, JR went to a prison in Tehachapi (California) and created a piece on the roof of the institution. The great mural shows the portraits of some prisoners and former convicts who also shared their stories. His intention was to "give voice to prisoners" and humanize their environment in the eyes of the people.
Critical reception.
In 2010, during a radio program in San Diego, California, artist Shepard Fairey stated: "JR is the most ambitious street artist working." "Le Monde" has described his work as "revealing humanity." With over a million Instagram followers, he's one of the most popular artists on social media.
Works.
"28 Millimetres".
JR considers himself as "neither a street artist nor a photographer". To carry out his projects, he uses photography but also video, prints on paper or tarpaulins, urban spaces, books and especially social links. JR noted "I would like to bring art to improbable places, create projects so huge with the community that they are forced to ask themselves questions. I want to try to create images of hot spots such as the Middle East or Brazil that offer different points of view from the ones we see in the worldwide media which are often caricatures."
"Portraits of a Generation".
"The Portraits of a Generation" project constitutes the first stage of the "28 mm" project. After the first unauthorized exhibit on the walls of the Cité des Bosquets housing project, JR returned and set himself up of this housing project and the neighbouring one, the Cité de la Forestière, both in the epicenter of the 2005 riots in the French suburbs. The first portraits were rapidly exhibited on the walls of the last popular neighbourhoods of the capital, in the east of Paris. These photos provoked the passerby in as much as they questioned the social and media representation of a whole generation that for some is only to be seen relegated to the outskirts of the capital.
"Face 2 Face".
The "Face 2 Face" project tried to show that beyond what separates them, Israelis and Palestinians are enough alike to be able to understand one another. Israeli and Palestinian men and women who have the same jobs accepted to laugh or cry, to scream or pull faces in front of JR's lens. The portraits created were pasted up face to face, in monumental format on either side of the Separation Wall and in several surrounding towns. JR photographed and Marco wrote, together succeeding in creating the largest unauthorized 20 urban art exhibit in the world ("la plus grande exposition d'art urbain au monde"). The project's goal was to show through images that art and laughter combined can break down prejudice.
The film "Faces", directed by Gerard Maximin, about this artistic undertaking carried out in the Middle East by JR and Marco has won numerous prizes.
"Women are Heroes".
For this project, JR slipped into fantasmatic places, the ones seen on TV when there is violence, the ones an observer might go close to but never enter and that will not be found on any tourist guidebook tour. "Women are Heroes" introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future. In seeking what is common in their gaze, JR tried to get closer to what is universal: the human being. This project allowed him to keep the promise he made to these women: "faire voyager leur histoire" (to make their story travel). Women are Heroes has traveled to locations including Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya, Brazil, India, and Cambodia. In 2014, JR made one final project for "Women Are Heroes" with the dockers of Le Havre, France. Imaging a woman's eyes from the previous trip in Kenya, JR and his team completed the largest pasting to date on shipping containers that were then stacked on a container ship traveling from Le Havre to Malaysia. In doing so, he finally took the women's stories around the globe.
"Wrinkles of the City".
The "Los Surcos de la Ciudad" project ("The Wrinkles of the City") is based on the encounter between JR, the city of Cartagena, Spain, and its oldest inhabitants who are taken as the memory incarnate of the Murcian city, marked by the scars of its history, economic expansion and socio-cultural mutations. While meeting and photographing the elderly, JR imaged their wrinkles, the furrows of their brows, as the marks of time, the traces of their lives that are linked with the history of the city.
For JR, these older people are the living memory of a city changing faster than they themselves age. For him, every one of their wrinkles and each day that goes by are inscribed in the buildings and in the streets of old Cartagena that provided JR with a heterogeneous architecture.
, "The Wrinkles of the City" project has reached Cartagena, Spain; Shanghai, China; Los Angeles, California; Havana, Cuba; Berlin, Germany, and Istanbul, Turkey.
In 2012, JR collaborated on the Cuban iteration of the project with José Parlá, a Brooklyn-based artist of Cuban descent, for the Havana Biennale. The artists installed huge murals of photographs of senior citizens who had lived through the revolution, enhanced with Parlá's calligraphic writings and painted lines.
"Inside Out Project".
The "Inside Out Project" is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work in the form of black and white photographic portraits. The images are uploaded digitally and made into posters and sent back to the project's co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. Over 150,000 people from more than 108 countries have participated.
In 2013, the project created a massive exhibit in Times Square in Manhattan that challenged advertising with art created from thousands of portraits of locals and tourists. The effort to engage New Yorkers across the five boroughs after Hurricane Sandy, was completed using one of the "Inside Out Project" Photobooth trucks. This method created by JR produced a more direct connection of his work to the streets through an immediate interaction with the community and the people. The Photobooth trucks have since traveled around the world for a variety of different causes, including a nationwide tour that brought attention to immigration reform in America, and a 10-stop trip to major monuments in France ending with a large installation in the Pantheon in Paris.
"Unframed".
"Unframed" is an ongoing project that began in 2010, realized using images by famous or anonymous photographers, and archival images that JR interpreted and took out of their context depending on the place, neighborhood, or city he worked in. In works such as those made in May 2013 in Marseille, France, JR dug into the identity of the neighborhood of la Belle de Mai, and invited its inhabitants to think about the memory of their streets by looking into their personal photo albums. The photographs, old or new, cropped or enlarged, create monumental artworks on the facades of neighborhoods and transform personal and multiple footprints of what is part of the city's history and collective memory. JR has exhibited "Unframed" works in Cincinnati, Marseille, Atlanta, Washington DC, Baden Baden, Grottaglie, Vevey, and São Paulo.
In 2014, JR continued his "Unframed" project on Ellis Island, using photos from when the island operated as the entryway for millions of immigrants to America. These archival images were installed into the facades and walls of the abandoned hospital on the grounds that once housed the sick and dying.
"NYCBallet".
In 2014, JR collaborated with the New York City Ballet for their second annual Art Series program. JR exhibited artworks in the Lincoln Center David H. Koch theatre in January and February, including a large installation of an interactive piece on the floor of the promenade. This work followed his model of engaging with his fans and the public across social divides, connecting ballet patrons to first time attendees with the image of the life-size ballerinas on the ground.
The Art Series led to further collaborations between the artist and the New York City Ballet, as months later he explored a new artistic medium of choreography. JR worked with the company's ballet master in chief Peter Martins to create a piece titled "Les Bosquets" based on his beginnings during the 2005 riots in the Parisian suburbs. For this project, the dancers became his paper and his works were transformed to the stage.
U.S.–Mexico border art.
In September 2017, JR erected a scaffolding with a large photograph of a little boy, on the Mexican side of the U.S.–Mexico border, giving the impression of the toddler curiously peering over the fence, when seen from the U.S. side. The boy, named Kikito, lives with his family close to the border in Tecate, where the piece of art was erected. On the last day of the installation, a border crossing picnic was arranged, with hundreds of participants. Food was passed through the fence, and was eaten off a surface with a photograph, picturing the eyes of a young undocumented U.S. immigrant (sometimes known as "Dreamers"). The left eye was on a table on the Mexico side; the right eye was on a tarp on the U.S. side, together creating the impression of a single long dining table when viewed from above. (Aerial photograph.) JR expected the picnic to be shut down, but it was tolerated, with one of the U.S. border agents sharing a cup of tea with the artist.
Feature films.
JR transferred his "Women Are Heroes" project to the cinema in directing a feature film made up of images of the pasting phase of the installations and interviews of the women. Through this documentary film, the artist shows us how he installed the portraits of the women in urban spaces and the reactions of the inhabitants. He explains "this film gathers the images and the words of the women he met, the day to day flow of their lives and experiences to create, through art, a reality different from the one shown in the media".
This first film was part of the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. It was programmed in during "La Semaine de la Critique" (International Critics' Week), and competed for the Caméra d'Or. In May 2010, JR was invited to present his film on "Le Grand Journal" on Canal+ in Cannes during the festival.
JR's second film, "Inside Out: The People's Art Project", is a documentary that tracks the evolution of the biggest participatory art project in the world, "Inside Out". JR inspired communities to define their most important causes with displays of giant black and white portraits pasted in the street. The project encourages citizens to take ownership of walls that were previously restricted and in doing so testing the limits of what they thought was possible. It is a Social Animals production in association with Notting Hill Films, directed by Alastair Siddons.
This film was featured as an official Documentary Feature Spotlight selection at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, premiered at the SVA Theatre on West 23rd Street, on Saturday, April 20 and debuted on HBO in May 2013.
In 2015, JR made the movie "Les Bosquets" inspired by the riots in the French suburbs in 2005 and featuring the performance of the ballet "Les Bosquets of New York City Ballet" (2014). The same year, he directed the short film titled "Ellis", starring Robert De Niro.
In 2017, JR's collaboration with the late filmmaker Agnès Varda, "Faces Places", was released. It won the "Golden Eye" for best documentary film at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival (won) and was nominated for "Best Documentary Feature" of 2017 from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Awards.
On 20 October 2010, JR won the TED Prize for 2011.
Prizes attributed to the film "Faces" by Gerard Maximin on the "Face 2 Face" project by JR and Marco: