Artist's hidden message on Ellis Island

The street artist JR has brought his trademark oversized photographs to an abandoned immigrants' hospital, but there's more than meets the eye

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It's faces that interest JR the most. The French artist, profiled by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes this week, made his mark on the art world—and the cities he visits—through the smirks and smiles he photographs.

He commands passersby's attention by pasting his giant black-and-white photo prints on hard-to-miss public locations, such as rooftops, sidewalks and the sides of buildings, until nature's elements wear them away.

"What's interesting about his work is that it's ephemeral," says Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson, who produced Cooper's 60 Minutes' story about JR. "It doesn't last forever; you catch it in the moment."

A child of Tunisian immigrants, JR got his start in street art the conventional way: graffiti. On 60 Minutes, he tells Cooper why graffiti appealed to him, saying, "We all [have] that sense of 'I want to exist. I want to…show that I'm here. I'm present.'"

Today, the work of JR, who conceals his own visage behind a hat and sunglasses, is about showing the world that others exist—specifically, those who may be unseen, says Cooper.

"There are a lot of people in the world that we don't see, that we choose not to look at, that we choose to pass on the street," Cooper says. "And I think he challenges that."

JR's photographs of faces have appeared all over the world: on buildings in Istanbul, on rooftops in a Nairobi slum, in a hillside favela in Rio de Janeiro, in a looted police station in Tunisia during the Arab Spring. He also directed an Oscar-nominated documentary, appropriately named Faces Places.

In his youth, JR made street art under threat of arrest. Today, he's often allowed or invited to display his work. In one recent project, the National Park Service let JR paste giant reproductions of old photographs inside an abandoned hospital on Ellis Island. The photos show doctors and nurses who worked there—and some of the 12 million immigrants who passed through New York Harbor from late 19th century to the mid-20th century.

The infirmary, called the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, was the first stop for many of those looking for a new life. If immigrants had even a hint of illness, officers deemed them unfit for entry into the U.S. and sent them to the hospital. Some of the hospital's windows offered views of the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline—symbols of a new life, frustratingly out of reach.

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