Building upon Déplacé-e-s, which shares the stories of refugee children from around the world, JR unveils his series, Les Enfants d’Ouranos, which explores the tensions between the visible and invisible. Les Enfants d’Ouranos translates to The Children of Ouranos—referring to the primordial Greek god of the sky who fathered the Titans, the first gods—and associates JR’s subjects with holiness. Negatives of each photograph are transferred onto reclaimed wood and reinforced with black ink for contrast. The children become glowing silhouettes, evoking classical depictions of divinity.
Showing this new photographic and technical process, JR renders the portraits of the children in a mysterious, uncanny manner: Instead of printing the positive, he transfers the negative directly onto reclaimed wood, adding black ink to reinforce the contrast. With a new technique that harkens back to earlier practices, JR creates an idealized version of youth, saturated in divine connotations, ripe with possibilities. Les Enfants d’Ouranos are children in the process of becoming adults, a transition where all possibilities of change and transformation lie. Their ‘yet to be determined’ adultness and the reminder of their divine existence place them in space and time—as Titans who existed well before the world was created and defined. This series finds our humanity’s origins in our own children— particularly those who are displaced and need to start over.