All images © Liz Johnson Artur
A new publication offers a glimpse at the artist’s 30-year collection of personal workbooks, which are as much about her creative image treatments as her sense of duty to those she photographs
“I very rarely look back,” says Liz Johnson Artur, best known for her long-term body of work The Black Balloon Archive, which presents photographic encounters with Black people around the world. That indifference to retracing the past changed with her new book, I Will Keep You in Good Company, which offers a fresh perspective of her images by way of the workbooks she has been assembling for over 30 years. The publication illustrates her instincts not only as a photographer but as an artist in the round and, perhaps most importantly, a curator of people.
Featuring excerpts from over 20 of her workbooks, I Will Keep You in Good Company shows that, for Johnson Artur, photographs are often not the end product but the starting point. Countless techniques and materials surface throughout: collage, tape, rips, paint, stitches, staples, Polaroids, negatives, graph paper, text. You can feel the aliveness of it all pulsing beneath the pages.
Until now, the Ghanaian-Russian photographer’s workbooks have only appeared occasionally in exhibition displays. Yet despite having less visibility than her standalone photographs, the experiments trialled in those books have always permeated her work. Her ability to create texture and relief on a flat page extended into exhibition-making, influencing her ideas of how photographs could be arranged, hung or printed, and paving the way for the sculptural photographic installations seen in her shows.
“For me, I say that I keep people in good company because I’ve been doing this for so long that I have created a certain kind of company”
Her treatments have often been driven by intuition, curiosity and accessibility, but never really by longevity since the workbooks weren’t intended to be revisited – not even by her. “The books in a way represent how I live with my work,” she says of her use of everyday materials around her, like fax paper, which was “not meant to last”. It created an interesting tension between preservation and perishability: “For me, there was something quite intriguing about the fact that you have an image that can disappear.”
Another material always within reach was herself, which explains the number of self-portraits in the book. “I wanted to have a character and the one that’s always around me is me,” she says. In this sense, I Will Keep You in Good Company behaves like a personal “time capsule”, too.
The diaristic nature of the book also comes through implicitly, particularly in the fragments of text layered into the photographs, ranging from functional captions to abstract annotations. Johnson Artur began creating the workbooks when she relocated to the UK, a move that transformed her relationship with words. “When I lived in Germany, I actually did a lot of writing, but I changed that when I came to London. I started to work much more through pictures,” she explains. “Language has always been there, but I’ve used it very differently to when I used to write. To me, language became a visual tool.”
In the spirit of continual transformation, Johnson Artur was eager not to simply create a facsimile of her workbooks but to produce a new artefact, one that gives space for the images and sequencing to breathe. Some excerpts were chosen for their continued relevance, others simply because they stand out. Together, she hopes they unfold as an intuitive “visual narrative” rather than a specific storyline: “I wanted to make a book that somehow tells a certain story about what can happen to pictures when you have them close to you, and when you engage with them the way I’ve always engaged with my photographs.”
This sense of intimacy also explains the book’s name, which is based on the response she once gave to someone she wanted to photograph who had asked what Johnson Artur – a film photographer – would later do with the picture. “A lot of what I do depends on people trusting me, giving me their picture. For me, I say that I keep people in good company because I’ve been doing this for so long that I have created a certain kind of company, because I put one person next to the other,” she explains. “I think the main focus for me is that each and every person has their presence there, but also that they, I hope, are fine together.”
