NAAM NA LA
Charlotte Yonga’s series from Senegal explores love as both tenderness and ache
In 2021, photographer Charlotte Yonga participated in an artist residency at Fondation Blachère in Senegal structured around the theme of love. Moving intuitively through the landscape and her encounters, she spent a month allowing the word to guide her image-making, resulting in a tender photographic series shaped by proximity, presence, and quiet observation. Upon returning to Europe, Yonga received a message from one of her subjects: “Naam Na La.” The Wolof phrase, meaning “I long for you,” reverberated deeply, distilling the emotional essence of the work.
''Love is potentially uncertain, murky, ambivalent, persisting in bodies and gestures, even in the settings and colors, radiating through its emptiness and fullness''.
Set against oceanic horizons and open landscapes, the images evoke love as both promise and uncertainty; surrounded by symbols of hope, fecundity, and infinity, yet marked by ambivalence, longing, and fragility. Born to a French mother and a Cameroonian father, Charlotte grew up in a quietly romantic setting – an old Christian abbey on the banks of the Green Venice river in western France. She discovered her affinity for photography in her early twenties while studying visual arts at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. “Photography was the discipline that allowed me to enter real life,” Charlotte reflects. “It took me beyond the confines of the studio, where I often struggled to focus, and into the world around me'' she says. Now living between Paris and Barcelona, the French-Cameroonian's artistic practice is characterized by a focus on questions related to identity processes, alterity or 'otherness,' and the concept of individuality when subjected to displacement, as well as the diverse perspectives between the Global North and South.
Through photography, video, sound, and drawing, her deeply reflective practice explores the textures of love, memory, mental health, emotional landscapes, and the fluidity of interpersonal dynamics, creating a powerful dialogue between the individual and the collective.
Charlotte Yonga’s series from Senegal explores love as both tenderness and ache
In 2021, photographer Charlotte Yonga participated in an artist residency at Fondation Blachère in Senegal structured around the theme of love. Moving intuitively through the landscape and her encounters, she spent a month allowing the word to guide her image-making, resulting in a tender photographic series shaped by proximity, presence, and quiet observation. Upon returning to Europe, Yonga received a message from one of her subjects: “Naam Na La.” The Wolof phrase, meaning “I long for you,” reverberated deeply, distilling the emotional essence of the work.
''Love is potentially uncertain, murky, ambivalent, persisting in bodies and gestures, even in the settings and colors, radiating through its emptiness and fullness''.
Set against oceanic horizons and open landscapes, the images evoke love as both promise and uncertainty; surrounded by symbols of hope, fecundity, and infinity, yet marked by ambivalence, longing, and fragility. Born to a French mother and a Cameroonian father, Charlotte grew up in a quietly romantic setting – an old Christian abbey on the banks of the Green Venice river in western France. She discovered her affinity for photography in her early twenties while studying visual arts at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. “Photography was the discipline that allowed me to enter real life,” Charlotte reflects. “It took me beyond the confines of the studio, where I often struggled to focus, and into the world around me'' she says. Now living between Paris and Barcelona, the French-Cameroonian's artistic practice is characterized by a focus on questions related to identity processes, alterity or 'otherness,' and the concept of individuality when subjected to displacement, as well as the diverse perspectives between the Global North and South.
Through photography, video, sound, and drawing, her deeply reflective practice explores the textures of love, memory, mental health, emotional landscapes, and the fluidity of interpersonal dynamics, creating a powerful dialogue between the individual and the collective.