Essay

“Photography was a way in,” recounts Liz Johnson Artur in explaining how she began to forge social bonds immediately after arriving in South London in 1991. “I just took pictures. I had a darkroom at home to make prints. And I focused on trying to find communities of people I could relate to.”[1] Born in 1964 in Bulgaria to a Russian mother and Ghanaian father, Artur spent her childhood in Eastern Europe and Germany where she had little contact with black communities and culture. To redress this, after completing her formative training in photography in 1990, the artist embarked on a far-reaching photographic inquiry into the lives and communal experiences of black diasporic populations primarily in Britain. The result of these efforts coalesce in Artur’s Black Balloon Archive, an epic, career-spanning assemblage of thousands of photographs and video works that collectively proffer an astonishingly heterogeneous interpretation of black subjectivity in the contemporary era.[2]

The year Artur arrived in London in 1991 coincided with the loosening up of Thatcherite conservative politics, and a shift toward greater recognition of black and ethnic minorities in British society. The UK census of 1991, for instance, included for the first time, “Black-African,” “Black-Caribbean,” and other race/ethnic options of self-identification. Such efforts were geared toward assessing the radical transformation of the nation’s demographic, which was spurred largely by the mid-twentieth century wave of black immigrants from commonwealth nations. Often dubbed the “Windrush Generation,” this influx provided labor necessary to Britain’s post-war reconstruction.[3] Yet their presence led to a near-immediate surge in xenophobia and racism, which materialized through decades of violence, riots, inequitable state policies, and criminalizing media portrayals of black subjects and communities. The effects of this could still be discerned in the early 1990s with the infamous and racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. It is against these historical matrices of oppression that Artur’s approach to portraiture emerged with political salience. Dissatisfied by a lack of accurate and nuanced representations of these black communities in media and top-down official narratives, the artist adopted a candid and humanizing aesthetic of portraiture to tell the often-overlooked stories of ordinary people.

Four teenage girls standing outside a schoolhouse. Two handsome men dressed in all white and cradling infants at a wedding. A young couple nuzzled up on a dance floor. Such instances frame in miniature the expansive ways that Artur’s archive maps the social events of diasporic communities by privileging the everyday. “There’s always the official story and there’s also the story on the street, you know what I mean? Somehow, people always know how to survive,” observes the artist.[4] Whether interacting with Afro-Caribbean communities in Brixton, or engaging beleaguered Afro-Russian populations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, throughout the archive one finds an overwhelming attention to ordinary social spaces: block parties, beauty supply shops, breakdance cyphers, churches, football pitches, markets, night clubs, and recording studios, among others. These sites often go unrecognized as legitimate sources of culture or tend to be framed with simplistic conceptions of the vernacular. Yet Artur imputes a politics of visibility in approaching these spaces with a high seriousness, producing vivid and intimate portraits that honor how these venues operate as powerful sites of political expression, diasporic solidarity, and identity formation. Moreover, her devotion to such sites implicitly presses against oft-held notions that the interdependency of art and politics can be relegated to privileged domains of engagement or cordoned off from the lives and activities of the oppressed. This critique cuts across other dimensions of the archive and its public presentation.

In 1995, the artist began to supplement her documentary work with freelance commercial assignments by shooting portraits for magazines including I-D, The Face, and Fader, as well as collaborating with musicians such as M.I.A., Manu Dibango, and Seun Kuti. Artur adamantly refuses, however, to impose rank or value judgments on these different facets of her work. “I like to look at the archive and consider every picture, or rather every person, to be relevant. I don’t have hierarchies related to who the person is or where they’re from. I don’t impose categories—they’re all about one-to-one human experience.”[5] This democratic ethos is reflected in the sites of the archive’s presentation which range from direct community engagements through exhibitions in a shop stall at Brixton Market (2010) and a projected installation in London’s Windrush Square (2016), to her work’s recent inclusion in biennials, commercial galleries, and museum exhibitions. Encountering the photographs in these varied contexts, or through the pages of Artur’s acclaimed 2016 monograph, one notices the suppression of metadata: names, titles, dates, or locations rarely appear alongside individual images. This approach to presentation seems to stave off nostalgic interpretations, and brings us closer to the artist’s own one-to-one experience of encountering and portraying individuals on their own terms.

Indeed, it is this open narrative approach that structures Artur’s most recent video, Real…Times (2018), which debuted at the 10^th Berlin Biennale (2018). The video convolves still photographs with filmic vignettes showing protests against Theresa May’s hostile immigration policies, the making of a radio program by the Born N Bread collective, and footage of a Nigerian-British student examining artworks at the Tate Britain. As the video’s narrative jumps back and forth between these scenes, the art gallery, the street, and the recording studio all register as entangled. As such, the video reflexively mirrors the structure of Artur’s archive as a whole by proposing a relationship between art and politics that is utterly porous and contingent on a multiplicity of subjectivities, representations, and perspectives operating in relation to one another.

[1] Conversation with the author, July 14, 2018.
[2] For the past twenty-five years, Artur has maintained a studio in Peckham, London; this is where the Black Balloon Archive is physically sited.
[3] The Windrush generation refers to the wave of immigrants that arrived in England between 1948 and 1971 from Caribbean nations. The term references the HMT Windrush, the ship that brought workers to the UK largely from Jamaica in 1948, and symbolically marked the beginning of postwar migration. My use of the term here is meant to denote the postwar migration of black populations to the UK from the Caribbean as well as Africa. On the history of the Windrush generation, see Kennetta Perry, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 13-15. d in Eastern Europe and Germany, and grew uos.lay. s  nded structure as prints are ingwere taken, each subject registers an emph.
[4] Niamh McIntyre, “Liz Johnson Artur’s photos celebrate black communities, black aesthetics, and black creativity,” I-D Magazine, September 29, 2016, <https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/j587y7/liz-johnson-arturs-photos-celebrate-black-communities-black-aesthetics-and-black-creativity>
[5] Conversation with the author, July 14, 2018.