The itinerant street photographer JR looks back on a career making connections in ‘Paper & Glue’

The title of the film Paper & Glue refers to the everyday materials used by the documentary’s subject: the French photographer and muralist known only as JR. But it’s also a metaphor for his true subject: Not just people, but the relationships between them, which are, the film suggests, as glue is to paper. Similarly, this movie — credited as “a JR project” — will stick with you.

JR’s previous film, 2017′s Faces Places, was an Oscar-nominated collaboration with the late director Agnes Varda, who traveled around the French countryside with her younger counterpart, armed with a mobile photo booth and a large-format printer used to create huge portrait enlargements that JR would paste on barns and anything else that could be used to make the art visible from a great distance. (The sense of restlessness and scale have long been part of JR’s MO.) Edited by Keiko Deguchi from 20 years’ worth of images in JR’s archive, Paper & Glue surveys the itinerant artist’s simultaneously whimsical and profound paste-up work, focusing on a handful of high-profile projects.

The film is divided into three parts. In the first and most recent, JR is shown working with a group of inmates at a Tehachapi, Calif., prison for teenagers who have been given life sentences. In the process, JR incorporates stories about an earlier project of his that took place along the border fence between the United States and Mexico.

A second section takes us back 20 years to JR’s first paste-up installations, documenting Les Bosquets, a notorious public housing complex in the Paris suburbs. It was during this project that the artist met the French film director Ladj Ly, then a resident of Les Bosquets, who appears in both archival and more recent footage. (Ly’s Oscar-nominated 2019 drama Les Misérables was inspired by the police violence and subsequent riots that tore apart his neighborhood in 2008.)

The final segment looks at the volatile, drug-plagued favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, where JR would eventually establish a now-thriving art school in the midst of what was once — like Les Bosquets — an area so neglected that government officials had thrown up their hands about it.

That’s a wide range of locations and subject matter, each with its own personal and political resonance.

But there’s a common thread here: people. Hiding his eyes behind dark glasses to mask his identity, JR evinces an easy rapport with everyone, from children to village elders, and from Border Patrol officers to drug kingpins.

The vastly different cameras used here — ranging from the amateur to the professional — can be distracting. But such optical variety keeps the narrative moving. This is a story about people first, but also about the way we see. And the visual hodgepodge of JR’s images reveals very different perspectives that affect the way we treat each other. JR explains, for example, that journalists often used telephoto lenses to photograph the residents of Les Bosquets, from a presumedly “safe” distance. By contrast, he used a 28 mm, wide-angle lens that required him to get right up in somebody’s face, creating a portrait that would fill the frame.

It’s a pre-pandemic concept that seems frightening today: getting closer to strangers. What can JR do now? We see him bicycling through empty Parisian streets during the worst days of the pandemic, but he still keeps in touch with the many friends he’s made around the world, over years of working and traveling. As he puts it, he creates art so that “people who would normally never meet get to meet.”

Paper & Glue, then, is his gift to us, at a time when people seem, indeed, as far apart as ever.