JR

Biography

A young globetrotting French artist, JR exhibits his photography in “the world’s biggest art gallery”: the street. After observing people he meets and listening to their stories, he affixes their portrait on the cities’ walls, underground or on the roofs. The artist says he wants to take art outside in order to reach a larger public and “revalorize people through their own image”. His approach, which he calls “artivist”, combines art with action, and deals with engagement, freedom, identity and limits.

JR starts his career with graffiti, willing to leave his mark in the public space and in society. After he found a cheap camera left on the Metro in Paris, he starts plastering illegally his photographs all over the capital’s fences and shop windows. He then turns to other graffiti artists and takes vivid photographs of them in action. Using the street as an open gallery, he creates his first project Expo2Rue (2001-2004). JR travels through Europe looking for people whose means of expression also deal with exterior walls: he questions vertical limits, the walls and the facades that structure the cities.

Portrait d’une generation (2004-2006) is a project carried out with young people from Les Bosquets, the “ghetto” of Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris. Willing to get rid of the sticky label of “racaille” – meaning “rabble” or “gang” – they get photographed doing scary faces as if to play caricatures of themselves. These pictures are then exposed in Paris’ bourgeois neighbourhoods for provocation: passers by are led to question the media representation of an ambivalent generation. This illegal project becomes official when the pictures are exhibited on the City Hall’s facades. JR’s first book, Carnets de Rue par JR, is published in 2005.  

In 2007, JR and Marco create the biggest illegal exhibition ever: Face2Face. For this project, portraits of Israeli and Palestinian people doing the same jobs are posted face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places on each side of the separation wall. The aim is to make everyone laugh when they see the other’s portrait and their own, and think about their similarities. The same year, these pictures are exhibited in Paris.

In 2008, JR takes an international trip on the occasion of his project Women are Heroes, in which he brings out the dignity of the women who play an essential part in societies, and yet are the main victims of conflicts, crimes and rapes. To do this, he photographs them in their everyday life and affixes their portrait on their village’s walls and all over the world. He met disadvantaged women in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Kenya, Brazil, India and Cambodia, and they told him their story in return for his promise to make it travel. Women are Heroes is a participative project, an artistic action in which no stage separates the actors from the spectators. Women become models for a day, and the villagers help with the pasting on the walls. In 2011, a documentary on the creation goes on screen, and the project ends in 2014 on a container ship at the Port du Havre.

Unframed is a novel urban project specially created for the city of Vevey, co-produced by the Images festival and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. It is a first in JR’s career: instead of working with his own photographs, he immersed himself in the collection of the Musée de l’Elysée. By reinterpreting and taking them out of context, he revisits works by Robert Capa, Gilles Caron, Helen Levitt or other anonymous photographers. The project is easily adaptable to different cities and was taken to Marseille, Washington, São Paulo, Grottaglie and, in 2014, to Ellis Island (New York). The following year, this last location became the starting point for the production of a short film starring Robert de Niro. The American actor himself is a descendant of the immigrants who came to the United States via Ellis Island’s “sanitary inspection.”

The Wrinkles of the City, led since 2008, is a world-scale project intended to travel to various cities around the world where human as well as architectural “wrinkles” are present. Taken to Cartagena, Shanghai, Los Angeles, La Havana and Berlin, the project tells the story of the meeting between JR and the elderly people. Only keepers of their city’s memory, they still carry the scars of recent historical, economical and sociocultural mutations.

March 2nd, 2011, JR won the TED Prize in Long Beach, California. On this occasion, he launched a participative and global art project whose aim is to “change the world”: the Inside Out Project (IOP). Inspired by his large format street collages, the project gives each and everyone the opportunity to share their portrait and convey a message significant to them. It is a global platform that allows everyone to share his or her story and to turn a personal message into a public artwork. Every action is documented, archived and published on the Internet. Nearly 200 000 people from more than 112 different countries already contributed to the project. Inside Out travelled from Equator to Nepal, from Mexico to Palestine, inspiring group actions on various themes such as hope, diversity, social violence or climatic change.

In 2014, the New York City Ballet invited the artist to create a massive installation in collaboration with the dancers, for the 2014 Art Series. JR photographed the dancers interacting with paper, his favourite medium, and assembled the life-sized pictures so as to create a huge eye on the ground. A collage was also executed on the façade of the David H Koch Theatre at the Lincoln Centre. After that, he presented the première of Les Bosquets, the ballet he produced along with the New York City Ballet on an original music by Woodkid, with the dancer Lil Buck. Les Bosquets is inspired by JR’s first project Portrait d’une Génération, and by the riots of 2005 in the French suburbs.

As a continuity of his ballet, JR directed a film (Les Bosquets), shot in Montfermeil. On a music by Pharrell Williams, Hans Zimmer and Woodkid, he shows how the strong desire to exist in these suburbs can fight insecurity and create beauty where we do least expect it. The film is coming out in 2015, and will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the riots.