Liz Johnson Artur was born to a Russian mother and a Ghanaian father in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1964 and in 1991 she immigrated to London, completing an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art (RCA). During the 1990s she took photographs for influential style magazines such as i-D, The Face and Arena, travelling frequently on their behalf to the USA, Caribbean, and Africa, while also beginning an ongoing series of images 'The Black Balloon Archive', not only documenting lives of the African diaspora, but also subtly drawing attention to and challenging perceptions of Black communities in the popular imagination. Johnson Artur has held solo exhibitions at the South London Gallery, London (2019) and her work has featured in group exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery (2016) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2019), among others.
Photographer and filmmaker Liz Johnson Artur was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1964 to a Russian mother, Nina, and a Ghanaian father, Thomas. Nina was unwilling to follow Thomas on his return to Ghana and as a result their relationship ended. As, at that time, single mothers living in Bulgaria risked having their children put into foster care, Nina arranged their passage to Duisburg, West Germany. With no money and nowhere to stay, mother and daughter spent nights in a former air-raid shelter turned homeless hostel where Johnson Artur caught pneumonia. The doctor treating her took sympathy on them and gave her mother a job which enabled them to move into a room in an accommodation block for nurses. Within three months her mother’s tourist visa had expired meaning that, as an illegal immigrant, Johnson Artur was unable to attend school. In 1985 Johnson Artur left Cold War Europe for the first time and travelled to New York, USA. There she stayed with Russian family friends of her mother in a black neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Referring to herself as ‘a product of migration’, Johnson Artur reflects that, ‘I grew up with my relatives telling me, ‘Yes, you’re black, but you’re not that black’’ (Johnson Artur, quoted in Ekow Eshun, Black Balloon Archive, Aperture, December 2018). Perhaps as a result, she explains, ‘I didn’t explore blackness because I didn’t see it as relevant’ (Johnson Artur, quoted in Black Balloon Archive, Aperture). In New York, however, she felt ‘It was the first time where I thought, I have to somehow find out where I belong’ (Johnson Artur, quoted in Black Balloon Archive, Aperture). She began to explore the city with a camera, ‘hoping in the process to discover a version of herself that accommodated race as well as nationality’ (Ekow Eshun, Black Balloon Archive, Aperture). Back in Germany she studied photography with the aim of returning to New York as soon as possible. In possession of a Soviet passport, however, travel proved difficult. Immigrating, instead, to London in 1991, she completed an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. In the 1990s, Johnson Artur began taking pictures for influential style magazines such as i-D, The Face, and Arena, travelling frequently on their behalf, to the USA, Caribbean, and Africa, while in 1991 she began an ongoing series of images documenting the lives of African diasporic people, The Black Balloon Archive, feeling a ‘very personal desire to connect with people’ (South London Gallery website). She now sees the work as characterising a perspective that is ‘missing when it comes to representing and occupying common ground’ (Johnson Artur, South London Gallery website). ‘Johnson Artur’s people are, for the most part, of African descent. You might find them, long settled or recently arrived, in London, Kingston, Brooklyn [...] They are ordinary black folk of ordinary income who are liable to be overlooked or stereotyped in the popular imagination’ (Ekow Eshun, Black Balloon Archive, Aperture). Johnson Artur not only documents the everyday lives of Black people, but also subtly draws attention to and challenges perceptions of Black communities held in the popular imagination. Images of men with children confront the trope of the absent Black father, while the image of a man in drag raises the subject of being LGBTQI within the Black community (Guildhall Art Gallery website).
In recent years, Johnson Artur has exhibited selections from the Black Balloon Archive in solo exhibitions at the South London Gallery (2019), and in group exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery (2016) and the Serpentine Galleries alongside Grace Wales Bonner’s A Time for New Dreams (2019). On display at South London Gallery, her first solo show in the UK, were new sculptural works incorporating photographs which capture the richness and complexity of Black British life in London. ‘What I’m interested in is people,’ Johnson Artur says of scenes shot at Black-majority churches and at non-binary club nights in Peckham Rye and Brixton, South London, elaborating, ‘it’s those people who are my neighbours. And it’s those people who I don’t see represented anywhere’ (Johnson Artur, South London Gallery website). Johnson Artur’s work incorporates photography, film, and installations. She shoots exclusively on film, and uses traditional photographic techniques to print onto paper, as well as fabric, tracing paper and cardboard. She has made use of such techniques in the workbooks she has regularly created since she first began taking photographs, and the exhibition functions as an expanded version of these ongoing journals.
In 2016 her monograph, Liz Johnson Artur, published by Bierke Verlag was featured in The New York Times as among the ‘Best Photo Books’. In 2020 she received the Turner Bursary and in 2021 she received the Women in Motion Award for photography at Rencontres d’Arles where her work was also included in the exhibition Masculinities. Liz Johnson Artur lives and works in London. Her work (including Top Shelf, a photographic installation comprised of 20 prints) is held in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery, London.