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”.
So she would slink off from her assignments, both at home and away, to take pictures of ordinary black people – at weddings, in parks, at clubs, in church, at the hairdresser’s – “just normal people, living everyday moments”.
Shooting exclusively on film, Johnson Artur has built an extraordinary collection of images that she calls the Black Balloon Archive. The title refers to a 1970 song lyric by Syl Johnson that describes a black balloon “dancing” in the sky, which is how she imagines her own movement when taking photographs. “I like to get up close when I’m taking pictures,” she says of her approach. “I don’t like to steal images. I take my time; I look at people and they look at me. I check them and they check me. I like that moment of connection: it is something you can preserve.”
Johnson Artur’s pictures can now be seen in her first solo show in the UK, which focuses on black Londoners.
• Liz Johnson Artur: If You Know the Beginning, the End Is No Trouble is at the South London Gallery until 1 September
