In Good Company

A new book by Liz Johnson Artur opens up three decades of sketchbooks, revealing the messy, tactile process behind her celebrated Black Balloon Archive, and reminding us that photography, at heart, is about the people we keep close

It’s early September in south London, and sunlight pours through the windows of Liz Johnson Artur’s flat. On the other end of the Zoom call, she tilts her head, her eyes catching the light, a friendly smile flickering across her face. Behind her, shelves overflow with books, prints and works in progress. Loose images are pinned to the walls, while fragments of paper and materials are stacked like cairns. This is equal parts home, studio and living archive. A scaffolding for a practice that has kept herself – and those she photographs – in good company.

Johnson Artur is best known for documenting the intimacy in public life, whether that’s churches or club nights, street corners or carnival crowds. Her photographs are tender and alive, and have formed what she calls the Black Balloon Archive, a three-decade-long practice of collecting moments across the African diaspora. Now, with I Will Keep You in Good Company, a new publication from MACK’s imprint SPBH Editions, she turns inward, opening the covers of more than 20 workbooks she has kept since the early 1990s. Part diary, part scrapbook, these volumes show where her photographic language was formed and how it’s constantly being remade. “I have never separated my work from my life,” she tells me, her voice steady but reflective. “To start the journey that I’m still on, I had to involve myself. It’s me who wanted these pictures – me who wanted to meet people.”

Born in 1964 in Bulgaria to a Russian mother and a Ghanaian father, Johnson Artur grew up moving between Eastern Europe and Germany. Writing had once been her outlet – “I could put thoughts down, but I didn’t feel like it was the tool to express what I wanted to say.” When she moved to London in 1991 to study at the Royal College of Art, language, she says, felt limiting. “I suddenly realised I wasn’t in a place where my English was up to scratch, and it moved me into this place where I had to talk with pictures.”

Photography became her voice, and what began as a personal impulse soon developed into the Black Balloon Archive, an ongoing project that traverses locations from south London to Russia, Ghana, Jamaica, New York and the Caribbean. The name is taken from a 1970 song by Syl Johnson, who describes a black balloon dancing in the sky that’s difficult to catch but impossible to ignore – an apt metaphor for Johnson Artur’s practice, that is attentive to what others might miss. “I go out and I am bound, no matter where I am, to catch a black balloon,” she says.

I Will Keep You in Good Company is made from the bulging, timeworn sketchbooks that have accompanied her practice from the start. They are, as she puts it, “a space where I can do whatever I want without anyone else looking”. They mix her own photography with magazine cuttings, notes, fabric scraps and flyers, which are annotated, ripped, smudged and punctured with holes, staples and dots. The visual conversations of a restless, curious – and before now, very private – mind.

For years she had them in a box, untouched. It was only when Bruno Ceschel, publishing director at SPBH Editions, suggested making a book that she revisited them. “There is a certain privacy about them, as they weren’t made for the public,” she admits. And yet, she also reframes that privacy as a gift: “It was a good reason to go back. And I think that’s a privilege of keeping a record – that you can go back and see where you were.”

On the cover, there’s a portrait of a woman with her eyes closed, overlaid with a dotted surface that makes the image feel both familiar and shielded, as if memory itself has been imprinted. The picture only came to light when a negative was digitally reversed during the book’s design process – an image Johnson Artur had made decades earlier but had never seen as a photograph until recently. Inside, the first page shows a taped-in snapshot of Johnson Artur holding her camera; its edges frayed, the word ‘book’ faintly typed above. From there, vibrant, joyful scenes of gatherings and community unfurl. “You open the book and you see people, you see life, you see all these things that I’ve been part of,” she says. 

Amongst them is a photograph at Notting Hill Carnival in 1995, the audience pressed tight around the stage. Instead of naming the faces she photographed, Johnson Artur scrawled ‘Foxy Brown’ and ‘Case’ across the page – the performers the crowd was looking at. “I was mesmerised by the audience, wedged in between,” she recalls. “I put these names there because that’s what they were looking at. I was looking at them, but they were looking at the stars.” In another image, a Madonna-like woman painted white, whom she often passed on the streets of Camberwell, reappeared suddenly behind her at a festival. “It felt like a present,” Johnson Artur says. “I took the picture, and it was the last time I saw her.” Elsewhere, there’s a friend’s father in Moscow in the late 1980s, and a rare photograph of her with her own father, whom she never properly met. Each is folded into the archive as a moment of acknowledgment. “It’s nice to be recognised and seen,” she reflects.

By the final spreads, the tone shifts. Made while living in Brighton during the pandemic, these closing images are monochromatic, negative prints of the sea and fields that read like a subtle wave goodbye. “It’s dark, but not in a heavy way,” she notes. Those pictures were a response to a world where people were absent from the street – “ghostless”, she says – and the camera turned from people and communities to landscapes and silence. The back cover carries a handwritten injunction: “take what is close at hand to reach what lies most distant.” Addressed to both her mother and her daughter, Anna, it threads her family directly into the fabric of the archive.

Crucially, the book resists chronology. “I didn’t time the book. I didn’t say, ‘Oh, this is the beginning and this is the end.’ In a way it’s reflecting how I work with my archive, because I don’t put down dates and places. For me, the proof is that I remember the moment.” Readers are invited to jump in anywhere, to linger on a page or skip 10 pages ahead.

The pace is intentional. Where her exhibitions have often staged the Black Balloon Archive in public – If You Know the Beginning, The End Is No Trouble (South London Gallery, 2019), Dusha (Brooklyn Museum, 2019), Get Up, Stand Up Now (Somerset House, 2019) and You Know I Am No Good (Biennale of Sydney, 2020) – the book offers a different register of time and intimacy. In the gallery, her archive becomes architectural and immersive: in If You Know the Beginning, she suspended images on four bamboo cane structures, integrating photographs printed on paper, fabric, tracing paper and cardboard, creating semi-transparent layers to walk between and behind. In Dusha, she layered sketchbooks, video, sound and photographs so the viewer sees faces and their movements behind them. The installations extend the workbooks into three dimensions, while the book, by contrast, invites you to leaf through those same gestures in private, to pause and linger.

That slowness, and a refusal of the speed at which most images circulate online today, is central to I Will Keep You in Good Company. “We reduce ourselves to swiping and having friendships on the screen. That’s not the way human bodies, human minds, are created. You can only have empathy and value when you have some kind of eye contact. You need to see other human beings, you need to feel them – otherwise you start demonising,” she adds. “I hope that my book encourages people to mess about.”

For Johnson Artur, the archive is something that will only keep growing. “My archive has a lot of chapters, things that I’ve gone through,” she says. Those chapters extend beyond the people she photographs, to the music, books and fabrics she surrounds herself with. Her practice is less about fixing moments in time than about staying attentive to encounters, materials and the company she keeps. Even the room behind her testifies to this: books, records, clipped prints and experiments acting as companions that keep her practice in motion – an extension of the archive itself.

“When I take a picture, I’m part of it – I don’t just take, I also have to give,” she says. “A lot of the time, people gave me something I couldn’t give back, and that’s where the title comes from. Someone once asked me: ‘What are you going to do with these pictures?’ and I said, ‘I keep them’. Because in a way, you create an accumulation of people, their presence. And when you are in good company, you appreciate those around you – that’s what these photographs represent for me.”

Liz Johnson Artur’s I Will Keep You in Good Company is published by SPBH Editions and Mack and available here

This article is taken from Port issue 37. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here