The Photographer Nobody Has Ever Fully Seen
JR—“Déplacé·e·s”
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viv, Ukraine. 14 March, 2022. A hundred strangers gathered in a city under bombardment. Together they lifted a child’s face toward the sky. She was forty-five meters long, printed on tarp… and she had crossed a border on foot only weeks before. |
JR is the working name of a French photographer and street artist, born in Paris in 1983. He is never photographed without a dark hat and sunglasses, and to this day has never given an interview showing his full, uncovered face. He started as a teenage graffiti artist, then found a cheap camera and began photographing the friends he tagged walls with instead.
By his mid-twenties, he had a signature move: blow a portrait up to building-sized proportions, then paste it, often without permission, directly onto walls, trains, or rooftops. He calls himself a “photograffeur.” The street, he has said, is the largest art gallery in the world.
This is JR himself, photographed beside one of his recent installations.
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| JR with his exhibition “Déplacé·e·s,” Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 2024. |
“Déplacé·e·s,” French for “displaced,” began in 2022. JR and his team traveled to places where families had fled war, persecution, or climate disaster: Ukraine, Rwanda, Mauritania, Colombia, Greece. In each location, with the help of local volunteers, they unfurled a single child’s portrait, printed on a tarp forty-five meters long.
The first was Valeriia, five years old, who had crossed into Poland with her family days after Russia invaded Ukraine. JR and his team carried the rolled-up tarp across that same border on foot, then printed her smiling face at full scale. On 14 March 2022, a hundred volunteers in Lviv held the tarp above their heads and carried her image through the streets.
JR has described his own aim in one line: “My art creates tension between the visible and the invisible.”
I assumed, the first time I saw photographs of this project, that the size was mostly for spectacle. Then I read that Valeriia’s own family helped carry her image through Lviv, and the scale stopped feeling like spectacle at all. It felt like the opposite of being erased.
Valeriia’s face didn’t stay in Ukraine. It appeared on the cover of Time magazine, then traveled to the Venice Biennale, then to processions in Munich, Rome, and Vatican City, carried each time by volunteers who had never met her. By May 2024, the full “Déplacé·e·s” series, including Valeriia and eight other displaced children, filled an entire exhibition at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm, JR’s first solo show in the Nordic region.
JR has never confirmed his legal name in public… despite winning the TED Prize, appearing on Time’s list of the world’s most influential people, and building one of the most recognized bodies of work in contemporary art.
A hidden face, spending two decades making other people’s faces impossible to ignore.
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