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.