Ke Lefa Laka / Her-story Volume 2 belongs to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series and to a two-volume body of work that Lebohang Kganye made in 2012 and 2013. The project grew out of her confrontation with grief after her mother’s death, and out of a search through a house in which photographs and clothes had always been present but had gone unexamined for years. The seSotho title means “it is my legacy.” Inheritance, in these pages, is not a settled possession but something the daughter must find, handle, and reinterpret.
Kganye was born in Johannesburg in 1990. She was introduced to photography at the Market Photo Workshop in 2009, completed its Advanced Photography Programme in 2011, and earned a Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2014. Her work centers on personal and familial history, and this series does not merely reproduce family snapshots. It reads them against the grain. Echoing Barthes on the photograph’s “having-been-there,” Kganye writes that the essence she identifies in pictures of her mother is in fact her own: her constructions, memories, and fantasies of a person she knew in only one capacity, as mother.
The book’s scale matters to its argument. As a hardcover of 16 pages with 15 four-color plates, it compresses the series into a sequence that can be held in one sitting, so that the movement between maternal image and self-portrait registers as an intimate, recurring act rather than a survey. In its original release, this volume was limited to 500 numbered copies and included a 5×7 inch print signed by Kganye—details that bear on how the work was first circulated and received.
For collectors, the strongest case is not category but method. Kganye treats the family photograph as an unstable document: evidence of a life, a prompt to fantasy, and a mirror for the survivor. Her-story Volume 2 makes that inquiry tangible in a small, deliberate book, and it does so at a point when the series was still new. Its interest lies in watching a now-recognized photographic intelligence work through loss at close range, using found images and clothing as the raw material of a form that does not resolve mourning so much as give it a shape.
