For over three decades, photographer Liz Johnson Artur has documented the people around her with an intimate, unshowy brilliance. Her latest book, PDA, celebrates a bygone London underground music scene: a queer club night that ran monthly in a Hackney basement from 2011 to 2021. The acronym PDA could stand for many things, including Public Display of Affection, Please Don’t Ask, or Pretty Dick Available.
Johnson Artur, now 61, became a regular at PDA despite not being a clubber. “There was a lot going on in front of and behind the DJ booth! PDA embraced everyone. They didn’t have a door policy. I was 30 years older than everyone there, but it was beautiful watching them take their space,” she recalls. Her black-and-white and colour photographs capture party-goers in thigh-high boots, bodies glossy with sweat, cigarettes, smiles and Schweppes.
The photographer attributes her curiosity about strangers’ lives to childhood train journeys from Germany to the Soviet Union. “You would spend 24 hours with strangers in a small compartment… you start out being suspicious of each other, but in Russian culture, you put food on the table and you share, and you start talking.” This experience informs her approach: “I photograph people because each person has a story. I can’t tell it verbally, but I can make a point about human existence.”
Johnson Artur’s own background reflects a blend of cultures: her Ghanaian father met her Russian mother in the 1960s. Born in Bulgaria, she spoke Russian at home, later moved to Germany, and eventually settled in London in 1991. She studied at the Royal College of Art and immersed herself in the city’s music scene. “It’s not about black this, that, or the other. It’s about wanting to be yourself,” she says.
The book also highlights Johnson Artur’s interest in self-fashioning in temporary, DIY spaces. She notes that music events “do something to people… they can let go. It’s the most generous art form we have, because it needs us. It lives from how we react to it.” Her photographs, often shot on the fly, pull viewers into the moment before it disappears.
