J.R….art that can change the world…

JR –  A photographer who believes art can change the world. He owns the biggest art gallery in the world, because he exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not the museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit.

This 27 old artists real name is still unknown and he speaks in public with sunglasses and a hat to remain his anonymity, but he doesn’t need to be known as a person, he is known for his art.

This young Parisian man with a sense of humor and full of energy, started his artistic career as a graffiti artist – but when he found a camera on the Paris Metro a whole world opened up to him.

His technique consists in plastering walls of different cities around the world with gigantic photographs, always black and white. Then, the magic happens: portraits of common people invade public spaces often forgotten, sometimes unnoticed, some others unwanted. JR never asks for permission to do so: he conquers the walls with the strength of his ideas and not with his name, so that his art can be bold and extravagant without any need of explanation. He doesn’t impose his works on the landscapes either, actually: his photos are almost never meant to stay permanently. They are just there to belong to all passers-by until the paper on which they are printed handles the sun, the rain, or vandalism (and street cleaning, too).

Although his interest in making meaningful street art has been constant throughout his career – in a broader sense – he definitely became a “photographer activist” when in 2007 he started the project Face2Face with a few friends. He photographed Israelis and Palestinians who were doing the same job in 8 different Palestinian and Israeli cities. He then printed the portraits in huge format and pasted them next to each other on both sides of the Security Fence that separates Israel from the West Bank: 20,000 square meters of paper to challenge prejudices. No one believed he could do it, and yet, against all odds, simply by explaining the project to all the people involved and asking them the permission to display them next to a Palestinian/an Israeli, he did it. (See more on that in Face2Face Project).

His search for new places where to display his art never stops, and involves different media and interaction with the surroundings: recently he covered 2,000 square meters of Kibera’s slums, in Kenya, pasting on rooftops blown-up photographs of local women for the project Women Are Heroes, a declaration for all women’s dignity. The photographs were printed on vinyl so that this material could prevent the rain from flooding the shelters.

JR directed also a movie dedicated to it.