I Will Keep You in Good Company (signed)

by Liz Johnson Artur

Photographs: Liz Johnson Artur

Publisher: Mack Books

192 pages

Year: September 2025

ISBN: 978-1-917651-17-2

Price: 71.5 €

Comments: Hardcover, 24.5 x 30 cm

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.

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