JR: Chronicles, Saatchi Gallery, review: childish politics from the streets of France

Stick ’em up! At the threshold of the Saatchi Gallery’s new exhibition, Chronicles, the largest retrospective yet for the French street-artist JR, a black youth is pictured taking aim at us, backed up by a gang. We may only be a few steps from Chelsea’s King’s Road, but it seems we’ve strayed onto the wrong side of the tracks. Except, on closer inspection, this man is wielding a camcorder, not a gun. What made him appear like a threat? Answer: prejudice.

According to JR, the 38-year-old son of Tunisian and Eastern European immigrants – who wears sunglasses and a trilby in public, and goes only by his initials – this black-and-white photograph of his friend, the French filmmaker Ladj Ly, prompted him to become an artist rather than a graffeur (graffiti painter).

For a while, JR had been snapping pals as they sprayed tags across the city, ever since, aged 17, while waiting at a Paris Métro station, he’d chanced upon a simple Samsung camera. (This, scuffed and spattered with paint, is reverentially spotlit on a plinth at the Saatchi Gallery, like a religious relic.) But that photo of Ly holding his camera like a weapon, taken by accident one day in 2004 in Les Bosquets, a tough housing project in a Parisian suburb, felt different, special. Time to put down the aerosol can for good.

A year later, JR was back in Les Bosquets, taking more pictures of residents in the aftermath of what he calls the worst riots in France since the Revolution. Several appear in the exhibition: playful photos, like distorted reflections in fairground mirrors, of teenagers pulling faces for JR’s wide-angle lens. They parody their demonisation in the media, suggesting that, in fact, they weren’t all menacing vandals torching cars. You can see why the series, titled ‘Portrait of a Generation’, caught people’s attention.

Since then, JR has photographed communities around the world, from Rio’s favelas to Nairobi’s Kibera slum to a maximum-security prison in Tehachapi, California. Typically, he spends time getting to know his subjects, before collaborating with them on eye-catching black-and-white portraits, which are then pasted, on a large scale, in their original urban environment.

This approach has won JR kudos: feted for reinventing documentary photography for the 21st century, he’s been invited to design magazine covers and stage high-profile public interventions at the Louvre, one of which seemed to make its famous glass pyramid disappear. (He specialises in spectacular illusions.) More recently, he’s produced vast panoramas, teeming with people in the manner of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover, “chronicling” entire cities (San Francisco, New York). A fluent, charismatic advocate for his own work, he is nothing if not ambitious.

Yet, when you strip away the hype, that work, peddling a chic brand of feel-good optimism, can appear frustratingly na?ve. In 2006, for instance, he pitched up in Israel and Palestine to take amusing portraits of regular folk living on either side of the wall. What, though, did this self-aggrandising contribution to world peace achieve, aside from propagating JR’s name? His work may be well-intentioned and charming, but it’s juvenile, too – like the efforts of a child trying to make fighting parents smile, to keep the pain at bay. Humour helps, but it’s no panacea for the world’s ills.

While JR, who is represented by powerful galleries, never works with commercial brands, his glossy, modish aesthetic wouldn’t look out of place in a fashion magazine. (Using bulldog clips to hang photographs is a cliché, to boot.) Meanwhile, the content of Chronicles – one series is titled “Women are Heroes”; another fawns over the supposedly overlooked elderly residents of various cities – feels airbrushed. Nothing, in contemporary art, is more tedious than do-goodery.

It’s misleading to situate JR within a tradition of documentary photography. At heart, he’s a society portraitist, with this original twist: he flatters those at the bottom of the heap, rather than the lucky few at the top.

From Friday until Oct 3. Info: saatchigallery.com