JR
http://www.jr-art.net
http://www.insideoutproject.net
"Art doesn't change the world but it can create an analogy. Art can change the way we see the world. And this for me is already changing things." JR is a young French photograffeur that started making graffiti in Paris when he was 15.
One day he found a cheap camera in the subway and he started taking pictures of his own and his friends' graffiti adventures. That's when he started working with portraits. Years went by and his art gallery is still the street. JR works are not conceived to last: the rain and the wind end up by spoiling them, but what remains is much more important.
In 2006 he launched Portrait of a generation, huge-format portraits of people from Paris' banlieues, where he looked for life behind the tragedy that was depicted by the media rethoric. In 2007 in the Middle East, with business partner Marc, he made Face2Face, which some consider to be the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever.
In 2008 he embarked on a long international trip for his exhibition Women are heroes, a project underlining the dignity of women who are the target of conflict. In 2010, the documentary Women Are Heroes was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and received a long standing ovation.
Last year, JR was awarded the TED prize. The same day he launched the Inside Out project:
"A subject you're passionate about, a person about whom you want to tell the story or even your own photos - tell me what you stand for. Take the photos, the portraits, upload it [...] and I'll send you back your poster. Join by groups and reveal things to the world. The full data is on the website - insideoutproject.net [...] What we see changes who we are. When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts. So I hope that, together, we'll create something that the world will remember. And this starts right now and depends on you."
Check out Inside Out Barcelona http://theinfluencers.org/insideout/
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The power of images in the street and in society. The way JR started: he was a teenager and he wanted to exist, to write his name everywhere, with pure graffiti, in the rooftops of Paris. Then he started to take photos of these adventures, in order to document his actions. |
But he was really intrigued by the exchange with the media. For example, Palestinians and Israelis see each other only through the media. So he went there with his friend Marco and shot people pairs, doing the same job, and pasted them in unavoidable places on both sides of the town, like the security fence. People couldn't say who was the Palestinian and who was the Israeli. |
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After that, JR decided to completely disconnect from the art world, go to places where art world doesn't exist and implicate much more the community. But in most of these countries, the people you deal with in the street are men and that's why he decided to make a project about women. |
JR kept on traveling. He went to Africa, visited slums and pasted eyes on the trains and the rooftops. Then he went to India, where he couldn't paste and so they used white with a sticky material and the images were revealed during the Holi Festival, when people throw colored powder. |
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When the pictures from the favela were pasted on the "Arcos da Lapa" in Rio de Janeiro, a monument of the city, they created a huge debate. So he started to bring these stories in the capitals: Paris, London, Los Angeles. It's all about the context: JR doesn't care if he's the photographer or not. Actually he also uses photos from archives. |
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