Liz Johnson Artur’s first UK solo show is infused with the insight that comes from her commitment to candid portraiture
It was nine years ago this weekend that Liz Johnson Artur took this impromptu shot of three teenage girls with a red balloon at the annual summer carnival at Burgess Park, south London. “It was my local park at the time, around the corner from my studio, so I was out and about, mingling, taking photographs of the event,” she says.
Johnson Artur has made it her life’s work to take candid photographs such as this one all over the world as part of a project to document the lives of the African diaspora. Born in Bulgaria in 1964 to a Russian mother and Ghanaian father, she moved to London in her early 20s to take a master’s at the Royal College of Art and later found herself touring the world as official photographer for acts including Lady Gaga, MIA and Amy Winehouse. Still, she “had this desire to record normal black lives and culture, which I was not seeing represented in the mainstream”.
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