I WILL KEEP YOU IN GOOD COMPANY by Liz Johnson Artur

Description:

Liz Johnson Artur

199020

Black Balloon Archive

I Will Keep You in Good Company brings together pages and fragments from over twenty of Ghanaian-Russian artist Liz Johnson Arturs personal workbooks handmade volumes she has kept since the early 1990s. Part diary, part experimental playground, these books are where she shaped her photographic language through layering, cutting, annotating, and assembling: a space for processing not only images, but life itself.

Each page is a tactile surface, combining photographic prints on canvas, tracing paper, faxes, and photo stock with screen-prints, handwriting, and clipped texts. The result is a sensorial, intimate archive of moments lived and witnessed of friends, family, strangers, lovers held with care and attention.

I like to be right next to it, in the middle of it, to take it home, Johnson Artur writes. To keep them close is a way of giving importance and appreciation. These workbooks are acts of presence visual thinking made physical and the foundation for her celebrated Black Balloon Archive, a project that honours communities across the African diaspora. I Will Keep You in Good Company is a candid, generous record of a photographer learning not only how to look, but how to stay close.