'JR'

Still on the Tate Channel, a video about 'street art' caught my eye. I have always had a big interest in street art and graffiti, my favourite being Banksy. In this video, 6 street artists have been granted permission to exhibit their work on the outside brick walls of the Tate Modern in London. All six pieces of work bring something new and exciting to street art. But the one Artist that really caught my eye was a man called JR. His work is slightly different in the way that he does not paint or draw onto the walls, infact he takes photographs of people then displays them in public on a very large scale. I personally have never heard of a photographer who works like JR, therefore find him really very fascinating. 'The street provides me with the support, the wall, the atmosphere, but especially the people. Depending on where I put the photo, the whole thing changes,' he says. JR's images can now be seen internationally but he started out on the streets of paris, using only his initials because of the illegal nature of his work.

For one project, JR created portraits of ghetto inhabitants of the suburbs of Paris – the scene of riots in recent years – and installed them on the walls in the city centre. In doing so, he aims to provoke and question the social and media-led representations of such events. JR's work often challenges widely held preconceptions and the reductive images propagated by advertising and the media.

                          

                                                      http://www.jr-art.net/