Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: New York's Immigrants NY Times

For more than a decade, the French artist JR has been pasting outsize portraits onto urban surfaces in Parisian banlieues, Nairobi slums, São Paulo favelas. His subjects: the locals, the not-famous, the threatened and the threatening, figures in the margins. Their monumental, expressive faces glued to buildings suggest — in ways that a building’s simple face cannot — that a city’s people are its infrastructure too, or are at least inseparable from it.

Lately, though, JR’s work, what he calls his “actions,” has reflected on the unmooring of people from places. Immigration is the subject of “Unframed — Ellis Island,” which opened last fall; the installation features enlarged archival photos displayed throughout the island’s abandoned hospital. For this week’s magazine, devoted to the personal migrations of New Yorkers, JR photographed more than a dozen recent arrivals.

“The first question we ask you when you get to the city is where you’re from,” says JR, who refers to his “mixed origins” and is himself a relative newcomer, having lived part time in New York for four years. “That’s something really special. Where I come from in France, when someone asks you, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ people can take it the wrong way. People say: ‘What? Am I not French enough for you?’ Here, there’s not a sense of that. Everybody is from somewhere, and that’s the strength of the city.”

After JR took each person’s portrait in his studio, the likeness was printed larger than life on stock paper (often on several pieces taped together). Then he photographed each subject again outside, on the street, holding up that magnified self. To be an immigrant is to have moved; to be a New Yorker is to keep moving. As captured here by JR, these newest New Yorkers become portraits in motion, unstuck, peeled loose, set free in the city. DEAN ROBINSON