Recently I have been on a trip to Paris and whilst I was there I visited a photography gallery 'Maison Européenne de la Photographie' that was featuring an exhibition by the artist JR.
Who is JR and what projects has he done?
The only way I imagine JR is the French version of Banksy as he creates art anywhere and he has a name that is unique to Banksy and keeps himself anonymous but this is what his website says about who he is:
I do believe that his website hasn't been updated recently because his exhibitions aren't up to date.
"JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors.
After finding a camera in the Paris metro in 2001, he travelled Europe to meet those who express themselves on walls and facades, and pasted their portraits in the streets, undergrounds and rooftops of Paris.
JR creates "Pervasive Art" that spreads uninvited on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle-East, on the broken bridges in Africa or the favelas in Brazil. People who often live with the bare minimum discover something absolutely unnecessary. And they don't just see it, they make it. Some elderly women become models for a day; some kids turn artists for a week. In that Art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.
As he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full-frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter. That is what JR's work is about, raising questions...
https://www.jr-art.net/jr
The project that I went to see at the photographic museum was Momentum which is his first major museum exhibit in Paris. We were lucky to be able to see this exhibition as it closed the day after we returned to the UK from our trip to Paris. The exhibition showcased his work from the first photos her took to new installations.
The first project we visited within the museum was Eyes on Boat, 1,455 container, 2018.
This project was based on when he went to Le Havre, Normandy in 2014. A 363 metre long container ship left the port to cross the world. With the help of dockworkers JR used photography to transform the ship into a big work of art, which happens to be his largest ever to date. On more than 180 containers, a giant collage showed the eyes of a Kenyan woman who JR had photographed in 2009 as part of his project Women Are Heroes which was a project based on paying tribute to women who play a vital role in society and who were the first victims of abuse in wartime. Her eyes were on the containers to make "her story travel" said JR. This marked the end of Women Are Heroes. The container ship was a mechanical piece where different parts moved, the ship was built really big I couldn't even fit it all in one picture.
Chroniques de Clichy-Montfermeil, France, 2017
In collaboration with the filmmaker Lady Ly, JR has been working on projects in Clichy-Montfermeil (Seine Saint-Denis), East of Paris for the past 15 years. In 2004 he created Portrait of a Generation which was a series of portraits of local young people, making large-format, black and white collages that he pasted illegally on the walls around the district.
On October 27th 2005, the death of two teenagers who hid in an electricity transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois while fleeing from the police triggered violent riots there and throughout France. JR returned to the heart of the neighbourhood and photographed there, using a 28mm lens that meant he could get as close as possible to his subjects, where he deformed their faces "just as the media distorts our vision of the suburbs" JR explains. A selection of these images were pasted on the outer walls of the MEP in 2006.
In 2017, JR continued his collaboration with Lady Ly. The two artists photographed 750 inhabitants, workers and passers-by, while asking them to play back moments from their everyday lives, which he then assembled to create a huge, epic mural. Presented in the museum for the first time in a lightbox, JR has created a singular portrait of its residents "who have seen the neighbourhood's utopian dreams fall apart, poverty and social tensions that keep increasing... a portrait of those who are trying to put some poetry back into the concrete," says JR.
Memory
A large-format collage of an anamorphosis, this distorted image becomes recognisable when viewed from a specific point, then disappears when the spectator changes position, like pictures in our memory that fade and disappear with time, leaving few traces behind.
In his work, JR explores the question of memory, individual or collective, of a building, a district, a city or a community.
Synchronisation
Since taking his first photographs in 2000, JR uses a specific process within a precise framework: he transforms his negatives into large-format collages that correspond to the scale of a city or highlights the identity of the people he photographs, gathering them into a group to make immense murals or, as he did here, in installations composed of electric trains.
This surprising installation invites the visitor to explore an immersive space built from recycled materials. Evoking the Paris rooftops that JR invested in his first works, the space proposes numerous points of view: floor to ceiling, outside and inside... This intimate space is also meant to encourage dialogue amongst visitors. Like Eyes on Boat, this installation refers to the Women Are Heroes project, for which JR had pasted a collage of women's eyes on top of the train linking Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, to nearby Uganda.
A second artwork uses electric trains to play on notions of changes in scale, movement and synchronisation. As the trains run back and forth on the tracks, faces are composed, almost as if by accident; they disappear after a brief moment and then come back together.
Expo 2 Rue, 2001-2002
It all began in the year 2000 at the Charles-de-Gaulle-Etoile subway station in Paris, JR, then 17 years old, discovered a camera that had been forgotten there: a Samsung equipped with a powerful flash. JR, who until then had been interested in graffiti, decided to use the camera to document street artists in action, most often at night. For three years, he made a kind of reportage, frequently presenting the resulting images in the streets and on the rooftops around Paris. To save money, he pasted them up in Xeroxes, then spray painted frames around them so they would not be confused withs ads or political posters. He thus created the illegal exhibition "Expo 2 Rue," turning the city into a gallery beneath the open sky.
The work was showcased for the first time at the gallery and is still an ongoing project. Below are pictures of the camera that JR found and some of the silver prints on show at the gallery.
The Gun Chronicles: A Story of America
U.S.A., 2018
Interactive video mural (images shown are stills from video mural)
Since 2017, JR has been creating immense participatory frescos, rhythmic and epic, inspired by the work of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1886-1957). He has photographed and filmed hundreds of people, alone or in groups, combining their portraits in narrative, highly realistic compositions that deal with challenging themes.
The mural combines portraits of 250 people representing a wide and complex spectrum of views on gun control-gun collectors, hunters, law enforcement officials, emergency room teams that have treated victims of mass shootings, lobbyists... There are more than 300 million guns in the United States, or 9 weapons for every 10 people - by the far highest level of gun ownership in the world. The US has correspondingly high rates of mass shootings, murders and suicides, and gun control is one of the most bitterly partisan issues in the country.
Between still and moving images, this work, JR's most recent, is presented here for the first time in Europe. Visitors are invited to use a smartphone application to select a figure from among the numerous portraits and listen to his or her story. A website has also been put in place, allowing the work to reach a larger audience. With this combination of photography and digital technology, JR is thus creating a new collaborative art.
Giants & Interactions
Giants, a series of monumental photographic installations on scaffolding created in situ, was inaugurated in Rio de Janeiro during the 2018 Olympic Games. Rather than working with famous athletes, JR preferred to photograph those who were little-known, those who spend years striving to achieve their dream of taking part in the Olympics, and whose identities seem to disappear behind the beauty of the perfect gesture. His photographs of athletes in action were then printed in black and white on huge pieces of canvas, cut out and draped over the scaffold. As he so often does, JR adapted himself to the buildings architecture to the site where the work was to be installed. The scaffold would thus become a sculptural element in its own right.
In order for this type of project to become possible, meticulous preparatory work is needed to obtain diverse authorisations and technical or administrative documents. This hidden aspect of JR's process is revealed here with the presentation of letters, architectural plans and three-dimensional images he refers to as "works in progress".
His whole exhibition really bought a lot of emotion across and it made me realise what the French have been going through. Although I don't live in France it felt like I was living it in that moment.
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