Finding hope, night view, Paris, France, 2020

Cover of TIME magazine published on April 16, 2020.

« I wanted to do something from the beginning of the confinement. I realized how the streets are empty, how people are questioning when and how we’re going to be able to go back to the streets. How people are looking at the street from their windows. Maybe I could just paste an image so that suddenly a sidewalk turns into something else.

Of course, the crosswalk is a beautiful thing anybody around the world can understand. We have the same « thing » everywhere that I wanted to play with. Having an anonymous person looking through it, with eyes of hope and question and just wonder of what is going on out there.

Depending on which situation you’re in right now, this image will talk to you differently. Depending on if you’re fully confined, if you have to go to work every day, if you have to go to the hospital every day. And that’s what I wanted to create, something that speaks to all of us. Depending on our own narrative, depending on what we’re going through right now. So, for me, if I’m reading this image, I’m looking at the hope of looking at what’s happening in the street like we’re doing every day, peeking an eye through the window, of when life will come back. But, you know, someone else might see differently.

JR - Extract from « TIME, making of the cover »