Working with inmates and guards, the French photographer’s gargantuan mural made in Tehachapi prison is the centrepiece of his first UK retrospective, opening at the Saatchi next month
In October last year, JR was eating lunch in New York. He was gearing up to attend the opening of his first major retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. His phone buzzed, and he saw a call from a long-time friend he hadn’t heard from in a while. JR recalls: “And he said, ‘What’s up, brother, how are you? Would you ever do any art in a prison?’”
The 37-year-old Parisian photographer’s face, in his trademark trilby and glasses, emanates from my screen. We’re deep into the pandemic, in the midst of which his new show – an even bigger retrospective at London’s Saatchi Gallery, titled JR: Chronicles – is about to launch. Sat in lockdown Paris, he seems cheered by remembering more innocent times. “I said, ‘Yes of course, but it’s too complicated’,” JR recounts. “It’s so much paperwork. But, if I could do something, I’d cover the entire jail with pasted pictures, like I did at the Louvre.”
His friend told him he would make it happen, and that he would call him straight back. “Yeah, right,” JR thought. “I was sure I would not hear back from him again for years.” JR’s friend, it turns out, was in contact with the governor of maximum-security prisons in California. And that governor, the year before, had happened to feature as one of 1200 portraits in JR’s project, The Chronicles of San Francisco, from 2018. “And so the governor said, ‘Give him full access to all my Californian prisons’.”