JR the big picture

French photographer JR has a big point to make. Preferably, he'd like a whole building on which to make it. But his mammoth ourdoor 'photograffs' are anything but preachy, says Jordan McGarry.

The phrase that used to do the rounds was 'Who shot JR?' But now it's more about who JR has shot. The big-Stetsoned star of the Dallas soap opera that ran until 1991 is long gone, and today the new JR is a Parisian photographer - and one of the freshest heroes of street art.

This summer, JR took part in the first exhibition of street art by a major British gallery, 'pasting' one of his giant photographs on to the exterior wall of Tate Modern in London, alongside work from other artists, including Faile and Blu. As well as his Tate piece, the iconic image of Ladj Ly from his 2004 Portrait of a Generation series, he made time to paste other giant works across the city, at sites including the Hackney Empire, Partizan's Soho office, and the Truman Brewery.

For JR, it's all about the pasting. He started taking photographs while studying for his International Baccalaureate seven years ago (yes, and yikes, all this and he's only 25). "At the time I was doing graffiti and I thought I could document all the crazy places I was going to at the time. All the places where nobody went: inside tunnels or on roof-tops. It was really interesting to witness all that through photography.

"It wasn't about documenting the graffiti writing, it was more about the life behind it; the writers in their surroundings, the places in Paris that nobody saw."

Being a part of the graffiti scene, it wasn't long before JR started pasting copies of his 'photograffs' on walls.

His 2004/05 28mm Project, in collaboration with Ladj Ly, a filmmaker living in the Parisian ghetto, saw JR taking and pasting powerful reportage portraits of the people living around him in Paris's riot-torn suburbs, the banlieu.

Having seen the difference between the life in the banlieu and the media's version of events, in 2006 he steered towards the West Bank in the Middle East. "I went there and I realised that with my passport I could go to both sides. They can't see each other, apart from through the media, and what they see through the media is one side suicide bombing and the other side killing
children with machine guns. But I just met normal people - taxi drivers, hairdressers, teachers - people who were all doing their jobs, trying to have a cool life and wanting peace. So I decided to focus on them, continuing the project on another level - but this time with portraits pasted together." He named the project Face2Face. Pictures of Israelis were taken and placed beside shots of Palestinians with the same job, showing how similar they are.

Notably, a rabbi, an imam and a Catholic priest all pulling funny faces were pasted next to each other on walls in the West Bank and, as the project grew, all over the world. "I realised that art has a much stronger meaning in places where it doesn't really exist. I wanted to go even deeper, so then I went to Africa." he says.

JR's work until then hadn't included images of many women, who were often hidden in the banlieu or hard to photograph in Palestine. "But in my travels I have met a lot of women who I could see were the key people in society but who were also persecuted or targeted during war."

Médecins Sans Frontières offered to help JR travel further to explore the idea of women's role in society, and the Women Are Heroes project started to take shape. JR takes pictures of women he meets in troubled areas, hears their often harrowing stories, and pastes the blown-up images up on walls in their area, then, again, in other cities across the world.

Alongside the portraits and pastings, Women are Heroes is also going to be a film, made with Anthony Dickenson and Dan Lowe, aka Partizan's LoDef. "There were no witnesses other than the camera; we didn't want journalists to follow us. So the film is the witness, showing the real impact the project had on the street as we did it."

And while new pastings are going up, some of the past pieces come down. But that's ok, he says. "It is really important that the work is ephemeral, because when I paste something in the Middle East I don't want to paste it so that it stays there forever, forcing the people to see that face in front of them every day. I just want to paste it. If people don't like it they can scratch it, they can peel it, whatever, and that will tell us much more than if it was behind glass and people
couldn't touch it."

The projects which he put up on the Tate exterior last month is already coming down a little, he says, and he loves it. "The Tate want me to repair it, they say they can't show work like that, but for me it's part of the whole thing."