JR: Can Art Change the World?

JR: Can Art Change the World? is Phaidon’s retrospective monograph on JR, the anonymous Parisian photographer and street artist known for large-scale public photography projects.

Phaidon published it in October 2015 as a 296-page hardcover, made with JR’s close involvement. It covers his bodies of work and his collaborations with other artists and institutions, and it adds behind-the-scenes documentation of his studios in Paris and New York. A graphic novel by the comic artist Joseph Remnant, commissioned for the book, follows JR from graffiti roots to a full-time art practice. The survey essay is by Nato Thompson, then chief curator of Creative Time in New York.

JR’s own site describes his first large-scale project, Portrait of a Generation (2004–06), which pasted portraits of Parisian suburban teenagers pulling faces. In Face 2 Face (2007) he photographed Israelis and Palestinians who share a profession and pasted the pairs along the Separation Wall. It dates the first retrospectives of his work to 2013, at the Watari-Um Museum in Tokyo and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. He also runs a non-profit that took the book’s title as its name.