Best known for fly-papering photocopies of his art onto the streets, JR’s origins as a photographer began when he found a camera in the Paris metro and began documenting his own graffiti work. He went on to staging portraits of his friends and acquaintances, which he would then paste onto building interiors and exteriors. One of his earliest photo series, Portraits of a Generation, was a documentation of the residents of the neighborhood Cité des Bosquets during the 2005 French riots—JR deliberately pasting the photographs in wealthier east Paris neighborhoods as means of social and political critique His work has been shown in institutions such the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Lincoln Center in New York, as part of a collaboration with the New York City Ballet. He is the winner of a TED Prize in 2011, and the director of a short film Ellis, starring Robert De Niro, in 2015.
