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Reading the Riot Art
Alternative representations of civil unrest
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Twenty years ago the French street artist JR began a photographic project called Portrait of a Generation with his friend, the film-maker Ladj Ly. It was JR’s first major project in a career that has seen him become one of France’s leading contemporary artists. Back then both young men were full of hope about making change happen in the marginalised Parisian communities where they had grown up, and with this project they wanted to create a body of work that communicated alternative narratives and representations of their friends and families.
JR was brought up in the concrete jungle of housing estates on the outskirts of Paris, far from the city’s middle-class central districts. Ladj was also from one of these Parisian suburbs, Les Bosquets, a community of people from largely African descent living in run-down tower blocks. At that time these were neighbourhoods with many underlying problems and social issues…
