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When a Paris graffiti artist found a camera on a train, his ambitions grew big. Now he plans to cover Tate Modern with the biggest photograph ever made.
JR started very small but went on to become the "biggest" photographer in the world. He plans to become even bigger. In the past three years, the young French photographic graffiti artist, or "photograffeur", has pasted - mostly uninvited - immense blow-ups of his work on buildings from France, to Israel, to Palestine, to the war zones of Liberia.
He has now been commissioned to post his work on the outside of the Tate Modern in London. JR plans to blow up a single image so large that it will occupy the full height of the 325ft (98m) tower at the Thames-side power station-turned-art-gallery.
This would be three times taller than any other blow-up that he has previously printed and pasted up. It would, almost certainly, be the largest enlargement of a photograph ever attempted. Printing such a mega-snap is no problem, he says, but pasting it to a structure as large as the Tate Modern tower could be a nightmare.
"I will need some kind of very big crane," he said. "I will have to talk to the people at the Tate Modern but we should be able to manage it somehow. When I was in Africa, people walked for miles to bring me the water to make my poster paste. Surely London can find a machine capable of helping me to post up a very big photograph."
JR, who never reveals his full name, describes the invitation from the Tate as a "consecration". He began in a small way eight years ago after finding a cheap camera which had been lost by a tourist on the Paris Metro. He had previously been a "tagger", or graffiti artist.
His photography is raw, jagged, full of movement, capturing the noise and energy of the streets that were his first inspiration and photo gallery.
See his work here.
JR, who comes from a middle-class Franco-Tunisian family, has never had a lesson in photography. His images now sell in Paris galleries for up to ¬12,000 (
