Welcome back to i-Dentity, where we celebrate global subcultures, past and present. This season, we’re taking a different tack, dedicating each episode to an artist who we feel truly personifies subculture. We kick off with a photographer whose focus – despite global success and critical acclaim – remains innately on the ground: Liz Johnson Artur. 

If you’re familiar with i-D, you’ll know her work. She has become part of the i-D family since first moving to London in the early 90s, contributing to issue after issue for the past three decades. Underpinning her images within i-D’s pages and beyond is an intimate, dignified representation of global African diaspora and the communities they exist within.

Born to a Ghanaian father and Russian mother, and raised by her mother in West Germany, she soon acquired an insatiable urge to connect with people as a way to help understand the world. Through a friend with a camera she realised that photography offered a means to be able to do just that. But it wasn’t until a trip to New York in her early 20s that the focus of her work crystallised. It was here, staying with a Russian family in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Brooklyn, that she first found herself comprehending what a Black community truly meant for the first time. “To go into a shop and it’s run by a Black person… that was something I hadn’t experienced before,” she reminisces. 

Since then, she has made it her life’s work to document these communities in a distinctly humanising – rather than sensationalising – light, highlighting common ground rather than points of difference. “We are actually everywhere,” Liz says. “New York was an important thing, but you know, I found things like this in places like Vienna. These communities come together and support each other.”

While the scope of Liz’s work is decidedly global – as is her reach: she’s figured in a show at Tate Modern, and had solos at The Brooklyn Museum and the South London Gallery – the city that it’s perhaps most strongly affiliated with is her adopted hometown, London. Here, she focuses her lens on those people who give the city its irrefutable sense of character – on residential streets, at protests, at clubs. 

This latter club setting is one that many instinctually associate Liz with. Many of her best-known images have been taken in Black nightlife spaces, from pictures of breakdancers mid-battle to photos that capture the resplendent glamour at cult London night PDA – hear more about that in this week’s episode. While acknowledging this association, Liz is keen to state that she’s neither a ‘club’ nor ‘street’ photographer, rather a chronicler of people in community spaces – a modern-day portrait artist who prefers to work with live-action backdrops, if you will. 

In this episode, we get into her worldly upbringing, London’s ever-shifting landscape, and Liz’s vast magnum opus, the Black Balloon Archive. Tune in here.