CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/17/2019

JR: Chronicles, reinventing photography for the 21st century

Featured image is a detail from The Chronicles of New York City (2019), an epic mural featuring more than 1,000 New Yorkers, reproduced from JR: Chronicles. This bright, beautifully designed clothbound volume with custom tipped-on cover image was published to accompany the artist's first major exhibition in North America, on view now at the Brooklyn Museum, where the monumental collage serves as the centerpiece. "In the summer of 2018, JR and his team spent a month roaming all five boroughs of New York City, parking their 53-foot-long trailer truck in numerous locations and taking photographs of passersby who wished to participate," curators Drew Sawyer and Sharon Matt Atkins explain. They conclude, "from his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics, his projects have always sought to bring people together. Along with the Internet and social media, JR has reinvented the medium of photography and its relationship to global citizenry in the twenty-first century."