Parisian street artist JR (b. 1983, Paris, France) began writing graffiti as a teenager, but after finding a camera on the Paris metro in 2000, he started to combine the two media. When riots hit the working-class and multiethnic Paris banlieue (neighborhood) of Les Bosquets in 2004, JR began his 28 millimètres: Portrait of a Generation project, shooting close-up black-and-white portraits of local young men making funny faces. He then enlarged the photographs to poster size and pasted them along city streets. The immediacy and disarming power of the human face at such a scale was an instant success, and JR began to think of himself as a “photograffeur,” an artist who applies the strategies of graffiti to photography. In March 2007, he traveled to Israel/Palestine, taking his signature close-up photographs of local residents from many backgrounds and faiths—including a rabbi, a priest, and an imam—all making goofball faces. That was the photo part, but it was the graffeur act of pasting massive, bus-size poster versions of the images on the West Bank barrier that cemented JR’s reputation. The following year, he went to Rio de Janeiro, where he created 28 millimètres: Women Are Heroes, working in the notorious hillside favela of Morro da Providência, pasting increasingly large images of neighborhood residents on the facades of houses that rise up the neighborhood’s steep hillside; he has also executed similar projects in Sierra Leone, Kenya, Liberia, and Sudan. His recent project, Wrinkles of the City, examines civic memory in rapidly developing cities such as Shanghai. In 2010, JR was awarded the TED Prize.
Art in the Streets, the first major historical exhibition of graffiti and street art organized by an American museum, surveys the origins and history of the movement in the United States and traces its influence as it spread around the world. Privacy Policy