On a fall day at the Brooklyn Museum, it was hard for JR, the most recognizable anonymous artist in the world, to go more than a few steps without a wave of double takes and a trail of enthusiastic fans.

JR, who is 36 and was born in France, has been in the public sphere for at least a decade, yet still declines to give his full name and insists on appearing in public in a fedora and semi-rimless sunglasses, a bit of schtick that can make him look like he’s stepped directly out of a Godard film. This persona, combined with his work — monumental public photography projects often made in parts of the world wrenched by political strife or made inaccessible by military conflict — has lent JR the aura of an empathetic Houdini, magicking himself into unkind places and performing the dual trick of not getting killed while stirring warm feelings.

“JR: Chronicles,” his largest solo museum exhibition to date, tracks his by now well-documented actions from the Gaza Strip and the slums of Southern Sudan and Sierra Leone, to more recent work in the United States. Because his art is centered on portraiture and involves wheat-pasting oversize prints on building exteriors — the faces of women in Rio’s favelas splashed across their homes, or disembodied eyes in Havana, Istanbul and Los Angeles — JR is usually categorized as a photographer or a street artist, but neither really gets at his abiding interest, which is people, and connecting them.

“I don’t really like the term ‘street art,’” he said as we walked through the exhibition. “My studio was the street for a lot of years, just because I had to install my work anywhere I could, and I didn’t know anything else. For me it’s art whether it’s inside or outside. Sometimes it doesn’t work in a gallery. ”