[12] JR began his career as a teenage graffiti artist who was by his own admission not interested in changing the world, but in making his mark on public space and society.

His graffiti efforts often targeted precarious places like rooftops and subway trains, and he enjoyed the adventure of going to and painting in these spaces.

At the age of 17, he began applying photocopies of these photographs to outdoor walls, creating illegal "sidewalk gallery exhibitions".

[9] After observing the people he met and listening to their message, JR pasted their portraits up in the streets and basements and on the roof tops of Paris.

"[17] In 2005, JR began pasting photographs of individuals from Les Bosquets on the walls of Paris to rectify the unbalanced coverage and representation of the people in the epicentre of the French riots that year.

[1][2] He used the $100,000 award money to start the Inside Out Project, a global art initiative that has allowed thousands of people around the world to speak to their communities through portraits pasted in public space.

This prize brought him and his work to New York City where he opened another studio, and inspired pastings in the area such as those done in 2011 of members of the Lakota Native American Tribe from North Dakota.

[24] In January 2014, JR collaborated with the New York City Ballet for their second annual Art Series program, by exhibiting work in the theatre in Lincoln Center, including an interactive piece on the floor of the promenade.

[26] In August 2014, JR was invited to work in the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island, an important chapter in the history of immigration.

[28] The movie, set in the abandoned Ellis Island Hospital complex and using JR's UNFRAMED art installations, tells the forgotten story of the immigrants who built America.

[30] That year, he also worked on his Giants series in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympics, creating new gigantic sculptural installations at the scale of the city, depicting competing athletes in action, supported by scaffolding.

[31] His latest projects include a museum exhibition dedicated to children at Centre Pompidou, a permanent collaboration with the Brazilian artists Os Gemeos at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in a space used to store stolen pianos during World War II, a gigantic installation at the US-Mexico border fence,[32] and a film, Faces Places, co-directed with Agnès Varda, travelling around France to meet people and discuss their visions.

[33] JR calls himself an "urban artivist",[34] he creates pervasive art that he puts up on the buildings in the Paris area projects, on the walls of the Middle East, on the broken bridges of Africa or in the favelas of Brazil.

[48] JR noted "I would like to bring art to improbable places, create projects so huge with the community that they are forced to ask themselves questions.

I want to try to create images of hot spots such as the Middle East or Brazil that offer different points of view from the ones we see in the worldwide media which are often caricatures.

Israeli and Palestinian men and women who have the same jobs accepted to laugh or cry, to scream or pull faces in front of JR's lens.

JR photographed and Marco wrote, together succeeding in creating the largest unauthorized urban art exhibit in the world[51] (la plus grande exposition d'art urbain au monde).

[20] The film Faces, directed by Gerard Maximin, about this artistic undertaking carried out in the Middle East by JR and Marco has won numerous prizes.

[52] For this project, JR slipped into fantasmatic places, the ones seen on TV when there is violence, the ones an observer might go close to but never enter and that will not be found on any tourist guidebook tour.

While meeting and photographing the elderly, JR imaged their wrinkles, the furrows of their brows, as the marks of time, the traces of their lives that are linked with the history of the city.

[57] As of 2015[update], The Wrinkles of the City project has reached Cartagena, Spain; Shanghai, China; Los Angeles, California; Havana, Cuba; Berlin, Germany, and Istanbul, Turkey.

[58] The artists installed huge murals of photographs of senior citizens who had lived through the revolution, enhanced with Parlá's calligraphic writings and painted lines.

The Photobooth trucks have since traveled around the world for a variety of different causes, including a nationwide tour that brought attention to immigration reform in America, and a 10-stop trip to major monuments in France ending with a large installation in the Pantheon in Paris.

In works such as those made in May 2013 in Marseille, France, JR dug into the identity of the neighborhood of la Belle de Mai, and invited its inhabitants to think about the memory of their streets by looking into their personal photo albums.

The photographs, old or new, cropped or enlarged, create monumental artworks on the facades of neighborhoods and transform personal and multiple footprints of what is part of the city's history and collective memory.

JR exhibited artworks in the Lincoln Center David H. Koch theatre in January and February, including a large installation of an interactive piece on the floor of the promenade.

This work followed his model of engaging with his fans and the public across social divides, connecting ballet patrons to first time attendees with the image of the life-size ballerinas on the ground.

JR worked with the company's ballet master in chief Peter Martins to create a piece titled Les Bosquets based on his beginnings during the 2005 riots in the Parisian suburbs.

Food was passed through the fence, and was eaten off a surface with a photograph, picturing the eyes of a young undocumented U.S. immigrant (sometimes known as "Dreamers").

[citation needed] JR inspired communities to define their most important causes with displays of giant black and white portraits pasted in the street.