JR on the Road: People, the Street, and the World as One Giant Outdoor Gallery

JR on the Road: The quintessential modern travel explorer.

The French artist and photographer JR (born 1983) embodies the quintessential modern, exploratory artist. He began his career as an ordinary, anonymous graffiti artist in the suburbs of Paris. The turning point came when he found a cheap camera in the Paris metro. He began documenting his friends’ graffiti work and pasting photocopies of the images onto the city’s walls. This marked the beginning of a travel-based artistic career that has now spanned the entire globe.

JR calls himself a “photograffeur.” His artistic travel concept is as simple in its basic idea as it is monumental in its execution: He travels to places in the world that the media and the outside world often forget, demonize, or overlook. Once at his destination, he spends time getting to know the local community, photographing residents up close in black and white, printing the images in gigantic formats, and pasting them onto houses, rooftops, train cars, shipping containers, and political walls.

Art Beyond the Safe Walls of the Gallery

While traditional artists exhibit in white, sterile galleries in New York, London, or Paris, JR takes his art directly to the most complex and conflict-ridden hotspots on the planet. For JR, this journey is a way to break down cultural barriers and force us to see the individual human being behind the headlines we encounter in the news.

1. Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas (Brazil) – Women Are Heroes

In 2008, JR traveled to Brazil and settled in Morro da Providência—Rio de Janeiro’s oldest and one of the city’s most troubled favela neighborhoods, heavily marked by drug-related crime and police violence. Instead of photographing the violence, he focused on the local women who held the community together.

He photographed their eyes and faces and covered an entire mountainside of makeshift homes and stairways with the giant prints. When viewed from below or from the air, dozens of strong women’s eyes gazed out over Rio de Janeiro. The project transformed a marginalized slum into an international work of art and taught travelers that behind the favela’s reputation lie ordinary mothers, grandmothers, and daughters.

2. The U.S.-Mexico Border (Tecate) – Kikito

In 2017, when the debate over the U.S.-Mexico border wall was at its peak, JR traveled to the Mexican border town of Tecate. There, he erected a gigantic wooden scaffold on the Mexican side of the fence.

On the scaffold, he mounted a massive printed photo of a one-year-old Mexican boy named Kikito. The image was angled so that, from the American side, it looked as if the little boy was standing and peering curiously over the massive border wall into the United States. The artwork stripped away the political rhetoric and replaced it with an innocent child’s view of the world. When the exhibition ended, JR organized a giant picnic across the border fence, where Mexicans and Americans ate together at one long table that spanned the border.

3. Kibera in Nairobi (Kenya) – The Roofs That Kept Out the Rain

In 2009, JR traveled to Kibera in Nairobi, one of Africa’s largest slums. There, he discovered that the residents’ homes were vulnerable to heavy downpours because the roofs were made of holey sheet metal and cardboard.

JR printed his giant black-and-white photographs of local women’s eyes on waterproof vinyl instead of paper. Together with the residents, he covered the roofs of an entire neighborhood as well as train cars on the local railway with the vinyl prints. The project spectacularly combined monumental art with direct practical aid: The artwork also served as a watertight roof, protecting families from the monsoon rains.

4. The Louvre and Venice – Reinterpreting Europe’s Classics

JR doesn’t just travel to the world’s hotspots; he also visits Europe’s most iconic cultural cities to turn history on its head. In 2016, he “hid” the pyramid at the Louvre in Paris by covering it with a photo print that matched the facade of the museum complex behind it exactly. In Venice, he has taken over historic palaces and canals to draw attention to climate change and mass tourism.

The Visual Nomads: Aesthetic Travel and the Quest for the Perfect Light

Alongside JR and the street art movement, the digital age has given rise to an entirely new category of traveling artists: the visual nomads. These are photographers, videographers, and aesthetic explorers for whom travel is driven by a very special visual narrative technique and the pursuit of moods.

Tokyo’s neon-lit nights and Iceland’s rugged wilderness

This generation seeks out specific visual aesthetics—what is now known as “Aesthetic Travel”:

• Cyberpunk and Neon Lights in Asia: Photographers are flocking to Asia’s megacities—especially Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong. They explore narrow alleys in pouring rain to capture the reflections from neon signs, the steam rising from street food stalls, and the city’s futuristic architecture.

• Minimalist and Dramatic Nature: Trips are just as often headed for Nordic and volcanic landscapes such as Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the Lofoten Islands in Norway. Here, they seek out the faint northern lights, black sand beaches, mighty waterfalls, and mist-shrouded mountain peaks.

Here, the journey is about patience—waiting for just the right light (the golden hour / the blue hour) and conveying the grandeur of nature to a modern generation of travelers.

Who traveled before JR?

One of the great role models for the modern, exploratory artist could be the world-famous French artist Paul Gauguin, who traveled to Denmark from Paris, married a Danish woman, started a large family, then wandered off again to Brittany—alone,  and then to Tahiti, and even farther afield. Geographical and familial escapism with an artistic bonus of epic proportions.

Experience modern visual travel culture today

If you want to experience the world through the lens of today’s young artists, head to the creative neighborhoods and landscapes of cities, where street art and visual storytelling are flourishing. JR on the road resulting in this and more:

1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Favela Art Tours

• Morro da Providência: Take a guided, respectful, and safe Favela Street Art Tour. Here you can still see the remnants of JR’s groundbreaking photo projects as well as a wide array of more recent murals created by local and international street artists. Proceeds from the tours go directly back to the local community.

2. Tokyo, Japan: Shinjuku & Akihabara Night Photowalks

• Omoide Yokocho & Kabukicho (Shinjuku): Head out after dark on a rainy night with your camera or smartphone. The ultra-narrow alleys of Omoide Yokocho (“Memory Lane”) near Shinjuku Station are filled with smoke from yakitori grills and glowing paper lanterns. It’s the ultimate mecca for modern night and street photography.

3. Berlin & Lisbon: Europe’s Street Art Capitals, JR on the road.

• East Side Gallery (Berlin): The longest preserved section of the Berlin Wall (1.3 km) stands today as a giant outdoor gallery featuring iconic murals created by artists from around the world immediately after the wall’s fall in 1989.

• LX Factory (Lisbon, Portugal): A disused 19th-century industrial complex in the Alcântara neighborhood beneath the 25 de Abril Bridge. Today, it has been transformed into a vibrant creative hub filled with massive street art murals, photography studios, independent bookstores, and design shops.

  JR on the road is part if the series the artist travelling, also see Bourdain:

• travel, people and of course food, Ernest Hemmingway and Jack Kerouac