This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine devoted its entire issue to the subject of walking the streets of the ultimate walking city. But it was the magazine’s cover—not so much what was inside it—that had everyone agog, thanks mostly to the French street artist and Ted Prize winner, JR.
Famous for his mammoth-sized, black-and-white portraits of people, typically pasted inside urban landscapes, and often visible only from afar, JR also happened to be lately preoccupied with the subject of immigrants and the issue of transience. For the Times cover, JR photographed a casually walking Elmar Aliyev, a recent transplant and 20-year-old Brooklyn waiter, and then applied the scaled up portrait of Aliyev to a triangular pedestrian walkway wedged inside Manhattan’s Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street nexus.
The portrait remained there for a mere 24hrs, during which pedestrians came and went, walking all over Aliyev without even knowing it. An image so large, it could only be seen in entirety from a helicopter, the surreal vignette was captured from above, unwittingly reinforcing JR’s point about the invisibility of those who often live on the periphery of our culture. Who needs Photoshop when we have JR?
Via New York Times
