I Will Keep You In Good Company
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.
- Author(s)
- Liz Johnson Artur
- Publication Year
- 2025
- Publication date
- August 1, 2025
- Pages
- 192
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- Publisher
- Mack
- ISBN
- 9781917651172
- Weight
- 1.74 lb
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