In Ke Lefa Laka / Her-story, Lebohang Kganye inserts herself into her mother’s photographs. The project began after her mother’s death, when the family album became both a record of loss and a place to stage a reunion. Kganye made digital photomontages that join archival images of her mother in her twenties and thirties with restaged versions of the same scenes, in which she wears similar clothes, assumes comparable poses and reoccupies the locations once photographed. The title, in seSotho, can be translated as “it’s my legacy,” and the work treats inheritance as something made rather than merely received.
The book’s form matters to how that argument unfolds. Nazraeli Press issued the title in 2021 as number 26 in the second series of its One Picture Book publications: a small hardcover of sixteen pages, with fifteen four-color plates and an original signed photograph. This is not a survey volume but a compact cycle, and the brevity works in its favor. Each image has to carry weight; the montages bind family album and reenactment without settling which one is past and which present. Kganye’s body of work, made in 2012 and 2013, is rooted in personal and familial history, and the translation of private grief into visual form keeps the book from becoming a private document.
Kganye was born in Johannesburg in 1990 and studied at the Market Photo Workshop and the University of Johannesburg before pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has received recognition including the Grand Prix Images Vevey and the Camera Austria Award. Her interest here lies not in spectacle but in the mechanics of identification: the artist adopts her mother’s poses, and later her mother’s role within the family, to examine how one self can hold another.
For a collection focused on contemporary photography and the photobook as a form, this title gives a concentrated example of an artist working with archives, autobiography and masquerade. It rewards close reading of sequence and design, and it sits within a publisher’s series that has long treated the small book as a serious medium.
