JR
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. He was pasting small photos in the street and framing them with painting: when the photos were gone, only frames were left. Then he was invited to paste in a really complicated neighborhood and he shot the famous picture of the guy using his camera as a weapon. Then they printed and pasted it much bigger and invited people to see their exhibition. During the 2005 riots in Paris, the neighborhood was locked and journalists couldn't enter, so JR was asked to go and document what was happening with his photos. With a 20 mm lens, he started to shoot caricatures of those guys and pasted them in Paris, demystifying the monsters.
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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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