I started reporting “In the Picture,” my profile of the French artist JR, on a warm summer morning in Manhattan earlier this year. I was told that JR and his crew would be pasting a massive image of a Native American man’s eyes on the corner of Grand and Wooster, but when I got there I couldn’t find them. There’s a small parking lot on that corner, with a large mural by Shepard Fairey and a Bacardi billboard overlooking it; I asked a tired-looking attendant in the lot if he knew anything about JR or a large mural, but he shrugged and shook his head, so I walked across the street to a small gallery on the opposite corner. Inside, there were some workmen fixing up the place. “Hey,” I said, “Is there an art project going on here?” One of the guys suggested that I look in an empty lot next door, and sure enough, behind a makeshift blue plywood fence, there was JR and his team adjusting a scaffold and getting ready to glue.
JR is twenty-eight years old. He is tall and thin and physically expressive when he speaks. As a teen-ager, he was an avid graffiti writer. Later, he became interested in photography, and now he works in different media, but mostly he is known for pasting large images—often, just eyes—in urban locations: a sprawling Kenyan slum, a garbage dump in Phnom Penh, the blighted enclaves of Shanghai. The pasting on Grand and Wooster belongs to a global participatory project called “Inside Out,” which JR launched earlier this year. Participants are meant to send in images of themselves, and he will print and return them as posters so that they can paste them as they wish. On occasion, JR will help contributors out, or paste their images in new locations to help draw attention to what they are doing. Some of the earliest participants of “Inside Out” were members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota, and JR had decided to bring their images to Manhattan.
In the lot beside the gallery, JR was kneeling on the ground, tinkering with his camera. Marc Azoulay, his studio director, was there, too. The rest of the crew was setting up the scaffold, which looked less than steady. Across the street, a member of JR’s crew yelled over from the rooftop of a building; she was looking for a spot to position a camera that would document the pasting with stop-motion photography. JR often documents his art in this way; his work is partly about his process.
“That’s good,” JR yelled, but the crew-member was not satisfied. “I’m going to find a better spot,” she said, and then her head vanished. More people arrived. Buckets of paste were hoisted up the scaffold, and strips of paper were unfurled. The more experienced members instructed the novices. “First, you take a brush and we put the paste all on the wall, like this,” one of them said. “This is the good part. On the bottom tier: that is where all the glue falls, on our heads. It is good for the hair, actually.”
JR climbed to the top tier, and explained that after the strips of paper were applied to the wall a second layer of glue had to be brushed over them. “Push hard with the brush even if it takes off a little of the ink,” he said. “Then you want to explode the bubbles on the side, you guys.” The wall is big, and the plan was to cover all of it. JR joked that there wasn’t time for politeness. “From now on, no more ‘Thank you’ and ‘Please,’” he told the crew. “If a squeegee goes down, that is it.”
JR told me that he sometimes thinks that the act of pasting is as important to his art as the images themselves, and I could understand why: pasting is a communal and tactile experience, and when it is done illegally or on a low budget there is an element of danger to it. I took some iPhone pictures of the crew:
One thing I learned about JR is that he’s not possessive of his work; the whole idea behind “Inside Out” derives from that impulse. I wandered out of the lot, and took a picture of the wall and showed it to JR. He asked me if he could put it on his Web site, and the next day, to my surprise, it filled up the home page. Here it is:
JR descended the scaffolding, and at the second tier he stopped. “Oh, the bubble,” he said. “Look at that! What’s going on at this floor?” He flattened out bubbles with his hands. “If we get a good rhythm, we should be done today—I hope so,” he said. When he got to the ground, he had a conference with Azoulay. “This is actually an easy wall,” Azoulay said. (It was easy partly because it was smooth.) He unfolded a diagram of the image, and studied it to make sure the enlarged version was not being pasted askew. “We are O.K.,” JR said. “You can see the eyebrow here.”
People began to get covered in glue:
And more glue:
JR wanted to check in on the camera that was taking the stop-motion photography, so after lunch we walked to the building across the street where it was positioned. While ascending the stairs, we met a real-estate broker who was trying to sell an apartment in the building. It turned out that the apartment belonged to the artist Maria Abramović. The broker invited us in to look at the place, which was sparsely decorated but elegant. (Somehow, a rowing machine in the middle of the living room fit right in.) From Abramović’s window, you could see JR’s piece taking shape:
The next day, JR put up another image, of a young “Inside Out” participant from North Dakota named DJ Two Bears, on an iconic wall in the Lower East Side. Keith Haring had made the wall famous in 1982, after he cleared trash around it to paint a vibrant mural. Since 2008, the wall’s owner, the real-estate developer Tony Goldman, has turned it into an open-air exhibition space. JR and his crew pasted the image of Two Bears over the previous mural, a painting of dimwitted monsters by Kenny Scharf:
JR likes taking pictures but doesn’t especially like being photographed; if you do try to take his picture he will react by making a silly face. That is what happened when Tony Goldman stopped by to check in on the wall’s progress, and photographers who were there encouraged the two men to pose together:
JR’s preference is for the media to focus on others: the people who are involved in his work. He had flown DJ Two Bears in from North Dakota to help paste the image of his eyes. When the work was done, Two Bears grew somber, and sat on a plastic container. The massive image of his eyes loomed behind him:
Once you are attuned to street art—its hidden codes and unexpected placements—you start habitually looking for it. During the Fourth of July holiday, I went to Los Angeles, and I ran into some of JR’s work on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, in Venice, California. This piece is above a restaurant:
Here is one that was just off the boulevard:
In New York, JR and his team continued to put up images. They returned to the corner of Wooster and Grand to paste a large Native American man’s face in profile next to the Shepard Fairey mural. It took JR and his crew the whole night to finish it. They needed a cherry picker. By sunrise, the team was exhausted. Still, they decided to fix parts of Fairey’s mural that had become weathered and torn:
So far, the most energetic “Inside Out” project in New York has taken place in the Bronx. In my story, I describe how it came about. Locals in Hunts Point photographed the women of their community, and then printed their eyes on strips of paper, which other people then held over their own eyes. JR and his crew went up to Hunts Point to provide the participants with support and encouragement. I went, too, and watched them cover buildings and bridges with images:
There were larger portraits, too. The crew climbed to the roof of a building facing the Bruckner Expressway to paste one. Several Hunts Point community members joined JR, including Benjamin Briu and Paul Ramirez. The team set to work. Briu knelt and unfurled rolls of paper, and cut the margins off them—a process that was tedious and time consuming. A water tower on the roof was supporting an array of cell phone antennae. It stood ominously close.
“Benjamin, come on, people are getting radioactivity here,” JR said, teasing him. He was holding a brush soaked in glue, and he laughed. It is hard to paste and remain serious. The team planned to cover a corrugated metallic structure on the roof first, and then they were going to cover the tower itself. “I can feel my third testicle growing right now,” Ramirez said, and he giggled.
“I got candy if anybody wants,” Briu said.
“Yeah, exactly,” Ramirez said. “A third testicle.”
The team pasted quickly, joking while working. “Do you know what Ben does?” Ramirez asked JR.
“No,” JR said.
“He’s an ambulance driver,” Ramirez said.
“If I called an ambulance, I would be dead ten times,” JR said. He swung the brush across the corrugated wall, and added, “We are teasing you, Benjamin; you know that.”
“‘Can you hear me now?’” Ramirez said looking at the antennae, and laughed. The eyes staring over the expressway were nearly complete. “Nice,” JR said. A ladder was raised to the water tower, and JR went up and up with his brush.
Top: An installation in Rio de Janeiro, from 2008. Photograph by JR.