JR (born 1983 in Paris) began as a graffiti artist before finding a camera abandoned on the Paris Métro around 2001 — the accident that redirected his entire practice from spray paint to photography. His first serious project, Portrait of a Generation (2004), photographed young residents of Les Bosquets, a housing estate in the Paris suburbs, and pasted their portraits — oversized, unmistakably confrontational — as printed artworks onto walls in the city's wealthier districts, forcing a direct visual collision between two Parisian worlds that rarely acknowledged each other.

Face 2 Face (2007), created with Marco Berrebi, pushed the same method onto contested political ground: giant portrait prints of Israelis and Palestinians, pasted face to face on both sides of the separation barrier and across eight cities. JR has described the moment the project's real subject revealed itself — not the images themselves, but what happened around them: the conversations, the arguments, occasionally people tearing the portraits down. In Tunisia, he later recalled watching his own artwork scratched off walls and recognising it as something closer to democracy in action than vandalism.

Winning the 2011 TED Prize gave JR $100,000 and, in his words, “one wish to change the world.” He used it to launch Inside Out, a participatory art project inviting anyone, anywhere, to submit a portrait and paste it publicly in support of a cause. More than 500,000 people across 140 countries have since taken part. In 2016, invited by the Louvre, he made its glass pyramid visually disappear through a large-scale photographic anamorphosis; in 2014, he installed thousands of portraits inside the abandoned immigrant hospital on Ellis Island. His documentary Faces Places, co-directed with Agnès Varda, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2018.

Portrait of a Generation (2004–2006)
JR’s first major public art project transformed the walls of Les Bosquets in Montfermeil, a Paris suburb, with monumental portraits of its young residents. By placing their exaggerated faces across both the neighbourhood and central Paris, JR challenged the media’s stereotypical portrayal of suburban youth and turned the city itself into a platform for questioning perception.

Women Are Heroes (2008–2010)
JR photographed women in communities affected by poverty, conflict and violence, then enlarged their portraits and pasted them across buildings, rooftops, trains and public spaces. From Rio de Janeiro and Sierra Leone to Kenya and Cambodia, the art project brought the faces and stories of women into highly visible public spaces, transforming overlooked communities through monumental acts of recognition.

Giants (2016–present)
JR’s Giants series uses monumental photographic installations to turn architecture, scaffolding and landscapes into stages for human stories. First presented during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the series later produced one of JR’s most recognisable images: Kikito, a gigantic portrait artwork of a young boy appearing to look over the US–Mexico border wall in Tecate in 2017.

JR's photographic editions extend the same visual logic as his public installations — large-scale black-and-white portraiture, often printed as Cibachrome or lithograph, produced in modest editions and hand-signed. Because his primary artwork exists in public space and is frequently temporary by design, dismantled or weathered away within months, his limited editions often function as the only lasting physical record of projects that otherwise survive solely through photography and film.

Print editions such as his Women Are Heroes lithographs and Ellis Island Cibachromes typically run from 3 to 500 impressions depending on scale and project, with larger unique or near-unique prints commanding significantly higher prices than his more widely distributed smaller editions.

For collectors, JR prints and editions offer direct access to a practice built on visibility and participation — signed lithogrpahs connected to projects held in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, and the Brooklyn Museum.