JR's Face2Face

2007 was the year when probably the biggest ever illegal photo exhibition was created. In 8 Palestinian and Israeli cities more than 4,500 square meters of portraits where posted on both sides of the security wall that comes between those two turfs. What was surprising about the whole thing was that neither the Israeli army or the Palestinian police made any attempt to stop the two people behind what became known as the Face2Face project.

One of them is JR, an autodidact street photographer who began messing around with the art of photography after he found a camera left on the Paris Metro back in 1999. In his early 30's now JR has the ability to make the streets of major cities all across the world,from France and South Africa all the way to as far as Brazil, look like huge outdoor galleries by transforming his pictures into life size posters. According to him that is an easy and flawless way of making sure that even people who are not into museums and exhibitions will have a look at his work while they are on their way to or going back home from work. During his baby steps as a photographer in Paris, JR was an all around player shooting in all kinds of places from dodgy urban ghettos all the way to the bourgeois districts where he decided to run the "Portrait of a Generation" project by putting up posters of weird looking people just to throw the residents off. This whole black and white close up thing that he had going on eventually became official after a hotel and the Paris City Hall decided to wrap their buildings with his photos. Going through his posters its easy to realize that his art has a very subjective touch to it. There is no specific meaning behind the faces in the posters he creates, and its always up to the spectator to make his or her own interpretation about the meaning behind such an artistic expression. JR's latest projects are named Wrinkles of the city and Unframed