The relationship between photography and death is long established. In the nineteenth century, as the medium emerged, it became common practice to create post-mortem photos to commemorate dead loved ones. Later, in the twentieth century, Susan Sontag — writing about American photographer Peter Hujar’s deeply moving images — said “portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.” Most famously, perhaps, was French theorist Roland Barthes’ book-long treatise on the subject, Camera Lucida, in which he delicately posed that the true essence of his late mother was to be found in an old photograph of her as a child. In these examples, a photograph is more than a flat, static piece of paper or a lifeless image on a screen, but a painful momento mori —a reminder that we must die. A photograph is an object, as Barthes believed, that has the ability to wound.
The piercing potential of photography is brought to its fullest potential in South African artist Lebohang Kganye’s poignant photo series, Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story, which she made following her mother’s death from a short illness between 2012 and 2013. In the series, which is currently on view at Africa State of Mind at Impressions Gallery in Bradford, the artist superimposes herself onto old photographs of her mother to create highly affecting images that shimmer with a phantom-like magic. They flicker with the intensely tender sensation of seeing a photograph of someone who is no longer here and imagining what life was like then. They do, as the artist tells SLEEK, “trigger memory.”
But the project is not specifically about death, but more so about celebrating the life of the artist’s mother and articulating the close bond they shared. According to Kganye, her mother “formed a large part of her thinking — she had a great influence on my character” and the project speaks to her ability to hold onto that, even after her mother’s passing. Ultimately, Kganye considers the project to not to be specific to her relationship with her mother, but more so to be about the universal potency of the mother-daughter connection.
The project was far from pre-planned. Instead, it came about “organically” through the grieving process. Kganye was looking at old photo albums, when it occurred to her that the clothes that her mother was wearing in the photos from twenty and thirty years ago were still hanging up in her wardrobe. She then spoke with her grandmother, who helped her identify the specific locations, and accompanied by her young sister, Kganye visited them. Her sister, behind the camera and with the old photo in her hands, instructed Kganye on how to pose to re-create the scenario exactly. In post-production, Kganye photomontaged her image onto the original photographs to describe a sense of going back to a place and time, “to try and continue a conversation with her.”
The result is stirring. The artist shares a physical resemblance to her mother and when their figures merge in ghostly unison in can be difficult to tell which is which. The scenes are domestic, typical, happy: weddings, family gatherings, posed snapshots in summer dresses in the garden. They are images universally recognisable in many ways, communicating something not just about death and loss and holding onto memories, but that common feeling of never knowing your parents fully, who they were before they had children. Kganye reenacts that desire by literally stepping into the lost world of her mother and fusing their likenesses together.
While the series hinges on the closeness of a mother-daughter bond, Kganye explains that this, in fact, speaks to a larger cultural history of South Africa — “because of Apartheid and the history of our country, there is an absence of fathers in a lot of black families. I was raised by women in that sense, because, you know, fathers and husbands were gone for multiple reasons.” Ke Lefa Laka has a sister project in which the artist delves more specifically into the history of her family name and her grandfather, that is as she says “a typical South African story that many people can relate to.”
In one image from the series, Kganye’s mother leans backward on the grass in an awkward pose. She’s wearing a white summer dress, her hair is cropped and she’s smiling, beaming. The artist layers her own image on top of her, mimicking the pose and body language of her mother. In this specific picture, it is as though the artist is floating outwards, from her mother and into the world. Arguably, it could be a poetic representation of how the project allowed the artist to process her grief, maybe even to let go. As the Kganye says, “Looking at the photos, looking for the locations, discussing her as a person, was a journey. It was very therapeutic in that sense.”
See more from the series below:
Africa State of Mind runs through to 15 June at Impressions Gallery Bradford.
All photographs courtesy of Lebohang Kganye and Afronova Gallery.