I Will Keep You in Good Company brings together pages and fragments from over
twenty of Ghanaian-Russian artist Liz Johnson Artur’s 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.
