Visages, Villages

Biography of the director

Agnès Varda
Born in Belgium in 1928, she grew up alongside four brothers and sisters. In 1940, her family moved to the south of France to escape the war. She spent her teenage years in Sète then moved to Paris where she studied at the École du Louvre and took evening classes in photography at the École de Vaugirard. Varda became a photographer for Jean Vilar when he founded the Avignon theater festival in 1948, then for the Théâtre National Populaire at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. She held her first personal exhibition in 1954 in the courtyard of her home. That same year, Varda made the move to cinema without any formal training. She founded Ciné-Tamaris (a cooperative) to produce and direct her first feature, La Pointe Courte, which has earned her the title "Grandmother of the French New Wave." She has since directed short films and features, both fiction and documentaries. In 2003, she began her third career as a visual artist at the Venice Biennale.

JR
He was born in 1983 near Paris and currently splits his time between both France (Paris) and the US (New York). In 2001, he found a camera in the Paris Metro and began documenting his adventures in the subway and on rooftops, then pasting the pictures on outdoor city walls. This marked the beginning of his work with monumental black and white photos. JR exhibits freely on the walls of the world, attracting the attention of people who don't typically visit museums. He pastes photos in the public space to reveal the faces and stories of people who aren't visible, from the French slums to Turkey, from Times Square to the Pantheon in Paris, from the ghettos of Kenya to the favelas of Brazil. When pasting, community members take part in the artistic process, and there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators. Since he remains anonymous and doesn't explain his huge portraits, JR leaves room for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passerby/ interpreter. This is the essence of JR's work: asking questions.