First comprehensive overview of the Johnson Artur's work.
info & order: Bierke
cloth hardcover, 22x27cm, 136 pages with 114 col. & b/w images; design: Hendrik Schwantes
Her calm observations and distinct visual language seem to engage closely with the object, forming a subtle exchange and dialogue.
„the only way for me to understand…why I took all these pictures…I was hungry…but I didn’t know…that I was…
it’s like when you start eating…you realize how hungry you are…and when it came down to pictures…I now realize…how hungry I was…“
Liz Johnson Artur
This book is founded on, as the choral work of three artists: Pierpaolo Piccioli, Liz Johnson Artur and Bernardine Evaristo.
cloth, 11-1/2 x 11-1/2, 168 pages
2021
Three different visions in a unique moment: the Valentino Collezione Milano fashion show, which took place in Milan at the Fonderia Macchi on September 27, 2020. A time of great changes, a time when COVID dictated its rules, but that did not persuade art.
“We are storming towards your future and you cannot stop us,” writes Bernardine Evaristo.
Paperback, 20 x 14 cm, 68 pages, 2022
Liz Johnson Artur’s work captures and celebrates the everyday, subtly complex and varied nuances of each of the lives that she encounters.
This book presents a new series of images called Time Don’t Run Here made by Artur during the Black Lives Matter protests throughout summer 2020 in London, UK.
Hardcover
24.5 x 30 cm, 192 pages, 2025
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.
Hardcover, 110 s/w and 97 colour images
23,5 x 26 cm, 224 pages, 2025
This new publication is a timely glimpse into the spaces around which the London club night PDA was created. Documenting the community it birthed, this book captures the spirit and strength of various interwoven stories in the nuanced sensitive narrative that is Johnson Artur’s photography.
Since its inception, PDA, established by Mischa Mafia, Ms. Carrie Stacks, Akinola Davies Jr and Siobhan Bell, prepared London’s underground for a new wave of experimental Black and Brown queer club culture. Offering a space where joy, care, and self-expression could flourish, the Hackney-based function built a platform where raw talent could be celebrated.
Combining the glamour and the spirit of chaos that would ensue on any given night, PDA offered a world away from systems upheld in UK’s patriarchal imperialism. At the function, liberation was not contained, as same day fashioned opulent wears, high-heels, and hair, were paraded to a soundtrack of experimental genre bending audio. A stairway for their wildest ideas.
PDA lives on as the principal reference point for many and catalyst that continues to maintain long-lasting connections. Johnson Artur’s images – all shot in analogue – observe shared camaraderie, intimacy, anticipation of the night to come, as well as games people play to prolong its end.
