Documenting a moment can be a sort of invasion. To be a voyeur to moments on the dance floor, to stand in another’s bedroom, to bear witness to sparks between two lovers is to pop the bubble of privacy. For London-based, Ghanaian-Russian photographer Liz Johnson Artur, her art lies not in capturing intimacy, but rather, creating it.

Johnson Artur’s fourth photo book, I Will Keep You in Good Company, constructs intimacy by blurring the lines of work and play. Out this fall from MACK Books, the title displays cut and manipulated old photographs of strangers, friends, lovers, and acquaintances assembled with clips and text from her decades-old personal workbooks.

I Will Keep You in Good Company serves as a sensorial catalog of shared experiences for Johnson Artur; a bricolage of memory. The project is, in some way, mimetic of her own personal memory-processing mechanisms—faces in the picture are no longer objects of her lens, but rather cohabitors of her own mnemonic landscape. All original encounters are recapitulated into new meaning—living, breathing, tactile on the page.

This sort of collectivism isn’t new to Johnson Artur, who made a living as a young photographer by profiling icons such as Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga and producing imagery for several fashion houses. It was only on the side of these career endeavors that she began to photograph, connect with, and curate work from Black communities across the globe—interactions which largely shaped her praised Black Balloon Archive. This body of work, still ongoing, chronicles and honors the African diaspora, and has been exhibited at various galleries including the British Library, the Brooklyn Museum, Kunstinstituut Melly and the Museum of Modern Art. 

A personal archive made public, I Will Keep You in Good Company proves itself to be a testimony to her artistic legacy. “I like to be right next to it, in the middle of it, to take it home,” Johnson Artur reasons of her relationship to memory. “To keep them close is a way of giving importance and appreciation.”