An undercover photographer, engaged artist and self-described 'activist', French photographer and street artist JR turns his photos into huge posters that he illegally pastes on the streets in cities world wide. Using a camera he found in the Paris Metro, he turns the city streets into enormous open air photo galleries, confronting passersby with up close and personal portraits of youths from the banlieues, as well as Israelis and Palestinians. JR feels as comfortable in the bourgeois neighbourhoods of cities like New York and London as he does in the urban ghettos of his native Paris or the favelas of Brazil, all the while using his photographs to spark debate and raise questions about prevailing stereotypes. JR has published three photobooks so far, My Street Journal; 28 millimètres. Portrait of a Generation (with a foreword by Vincent Cassel) and Face2Face (published in June 2007 by Editions Alternatives). He exhibited his huge posters on the outside walls of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and at the Hotel de Ville in Paris in 2006, among other places. In 2007 his work is presented in a special installation at Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, curated by Anneloes van Gaalen. JR's website www.jr-art.net is constantly updated with new photos of his work on the streets and presents more information about his projects and (upcoming) exhibitions in Germany, Italy, France and the US. After winning the TED Prize in 2011 he started the project Inside Out, a large scale
participatory project about identity. His current project Unframed reinterprets in huge formats photos from important photographers taken from the archives of museums. JR is represented by Galerie Perrotin in Paris.