JR: extraordinary street art

He is a graffiti artist with a camera – and a huge imagination. His name is JR, and he is transforming the streets of many of our cities with his extraordinary street art/photography.

JR (he uses his initials because of the illegal nature of his work) pastes huge, (usually) B&W photographs of people in high-visibility public spaces such as walls and windows of buildings, rooftops, side panels of buses, etc creating a new kind of graffiti in the guise of street art/photography.

The themes of his photographs highlight a deep concern for humanity, drawing attention to social causes, wars, human emotions and suffering – challenging many of our present-day (preconceived) notions.

For instance, in a write-up on JR’s street art, the Tate Modern Gallery website cites, “His work with Palestinian and Israeli citizens explored the similarities of their daily lives, rather than focusing on the ever present divide, highlighting fundamental human emotions.”

A Frenchman who remains incognito (like Banksy), JR describes himself and his work on his own website:

“As an undercover photographer, JR transforms his pictures into posters and makes open space photo galleries out of our streets. An acute observer of our time, as comfortable in cozy neighborhoods as in urban ghettos, he questions pedestrians with the exhibitions he mounts on their everyday commutes.

Using a camera he found once in the subway, JR finds inspiration in informal encounters he makes following his travels and his intuitions.

From 2001, he has been pointing his camera to a number of communities (writers, breakdancers, freestylers...), and worked with popular actors and musicians such as Vincent Cassel, IAM or the Gotan Project.

From 2004, he has been working on the 28 millimetres project, the first part of which – Portrait of a generation – led him up to the New York Times front page. The large size pictures of the Montfermeil and Clichy-sous-Bois youth have been notably displayed on the walls of the European Center for Photography and the square of the Hotel de Ville, in Paris.

His pictures are beginning to sell at Hotel Drouot of Paris; he keeps on planning unauthorized exhibitions of large size pictures such as in Rome or in Wuppertal (Germany). He is currently working on the second and third parts of the 28 millimetres project in Middle East and Brazil.

The 3rd stage of the 28 millimeters project – Women Are Heroes – has already led him to Africa in post-conflicting zones to shoot the women with whom he wishes to share painful stories and to testify their desire to live. Their portraits were already pasted in Sierra-Leone and in Liberia. In 2008-2009, JR will develop this project in India and in Asia.”

To learn more about JR and his extraordinary street art, please visit JR’s website (showing videos of how his street art is installed), or the Lazarides Gallery JR page, or the Tate Modern Gallery JR page.

JR’s 28 millimetres project has its special place here.

[Citation: JR’s website, Lazarides Gallery website, Tate Modern Gallery website, 28 millimeters project website. JR’s street installation image reproduced here from the Tate Modern Gallery website (courtesy the artist and the Lazarides Gallery).]

Elle Muliarchyk – the bold and the beautiful

Alone Hermès
self-staged photograph by Elle Muliarchyk.

Belarus-born Elle Muliarchyk, 23, blonde and beautiful, sets my heart racing. Not just for her beauty, but also for her artistic accomplishments, which she seems to have achieved with a curiosity and daring not easy to come by.

Elle Muliarchyk is a model and a photographer in her own right, modelling in her own photographs and staging the entire performance with clothes, make-up, props, lights, tripod and camera… in dressing rooms of high-fashion boutiques, and even in dangerous locations outdoors at night… within minutes and in most trying situations, to avoid getting caught.

What Elle Muliarchyk does is walk into some of the most glamorous boutiques, take photographs of herself wearing the choicest expensive clothes, posing for the shots, adding props and lights to compose her pictures, and then walk out of the store without buying anything. She usually has only minutes to do this daring act before getting caught by the store attendants and getting kicked out of the store or arrested by the police.

As she says in her self-styled profile on SHOWstudio: “Doing this I become my own photographer, model, art director, make up artist and hair stylist. I can be whoever I desire at that moment ‘a movie star, a Vamp, a Seductress’, and own those outrageously unaffordable clothes for a few moments, never having to pay for it!”

But that’s not all. While collaborating with fashion designer Bella Freud on a project, Elle Muliarchyk has walked around in some of London’s seedy areas at night, armed with her tripod and her camera, taking self-portraits in Freud’s latest collection. Apparently, during her first shot, she was attacked and mugged by a gang of eight men, witnessed a robbery of a boutique and had to escape the guys on the motorcycles. But, as she says in her SHOWstudio profile, “the images were totally worth getting.”

Fashion Television has featured Elle Muliarchyk and her daring acts on a couple of occasions, which can be seen here and here.

Elle Muliarchyk’s SHOWstudio profile can be found here, and a selection of her photographs can be seen on the German website Stern.de.

Zarah Crawford of The New York Times has done a story on Elle Muliarchyk in August 2006, called Pretty Larceny, which makes interesting reading. It also explains the ‘Alone Hermès’ photograph displayed in this post.

[Citation: Elle Muliarchyk profile on SHOWstudio; Elle Muliarchyk videos on Fashion Television; Elle Muliarchyk’s photographs on Stern.de; and Zarah Crawford’s story on Elle Muliarchyk, Pretty Larceny, on The New York Times, 27 August 2006. ‘Alone Hermès’ photograph reproduced from Elle Muliarchyk’s collection on Stern.de.]