Up Close With JR at the Brooklyn Museum

“People think I’m a photographer — I’m not,” says JR from behind his signature dark sunglasses. “Photography is just a medium. The pasting is the art, and the art is the process of doing it with the people.” The French artist is at the Brooklyn Museum in the days ahead of a major show, “Chronicles,” which surveys his complete body of work for the first time in North America. Just as he rejects the label of photographer, he also doesn’t particularly like the categorization of a “street artist,” although he got his start in the graffiti culture of Paris and made his name wheatpasting his photographs on walls, at first illegally. “If I take your photo, it doesn’t matter if I’m a good or bad photographer,” he adds. “It’s as important as the process of making the glue, of the printing. The art will be to use your portrait on the wall. That’s where everything will connect. If not, it’s just a portrait of you.” Most of the pieces were already in place, including his latest work, a large-scale collaged mural of New Yorkers stretching across four walls of the space. But the image that he points to as launching his career was

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