During summer 2014, French artist JR wrote another chapter of his Women are Heroes project in the northern port city of Le Havre. In just under ten days, JR and a team of volunteers took on the gigantic task of pasting 2,600 strips of paper over 180 containers—a total of 6.5 km—to recreate an image set to travel across the globe to Malaysia on a 363-meter-long ship. Young French director Guillaume Cagniard, a regular fellow traveler on JR’s many adventures on many adventures, dives into further into his monochrome depiction of the project:

Through the portraits of dockers I wanted to show an example of a profession embodied by proud and solitary men. Deeply rooted in traditional values, they defy the constant coming and going of ships.

I also thought it was important to pay tribute to the various trades in the port, without which creating a project such as this would not have been possible.  

The port is a very secluded place, closed off by barriers, without women. One can only become a docker strictly through father-son legacies, which I illustrate with three generations of dockers stacked on top of each other, watching the boat drift away. With this project, we created friendships and they ended up joining us in pasting the eyes of a woman: the first woman on the port.

Timothée Verrecchia is Editor-at-Large at L’Officiel Hommes.