A sensibility, an opinion, opens up the possibility of a conversation. Photographs are always about more that what they show.

“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in photographs. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

A man jumps over his own reflection, a passerby is caught in irony or contradiction in front of a street sign. The foreground comments on the background. The shadows betray the figure.

To this day, one of the most influential photobooks ever made is Irving Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room. It is noted for the photographs … but it is equally monumental for the profound way in which the photographer attempts to engage the world.

This is the essence of JR’s work: flyposting photographic portraits (with neither official permission, nor corporate endorsement) on a large scale, in the public space.

Charles Jones, the son of a master butcher, was born in England in 1866. He trained as a gardener and took various positions on private estates in England. It is thought that a number of the prints featured in the book were probably made between 1895-1905.

If Rembrandt were a photographer instead of a painter, and if he were drawn to the margins of society rather than to himself, he might have produced works very much like those of Pierre Gonnord.

A portrait almost always carries the weight of a story behind it. That is, I think, what separates the successful portrait from the failure. A successful portrait has a story and a voice that speaks through the image, wanting to tell it.

The Photobook is a pivotal work for it defines explicitly something understood but never stated: there are photographs conceived for a gallery space, and there are photographs which have their natural expression in the pages of a book.

The found photo is a strange beast. It is a photo with one foot in the grave; redeemed (if that is the right word) through someone’s interest in it.