Charlotte Yonga’s series from Senegal reveals the pleasures and pains of loving and being loved
To choose the concept of ‘love’ as a source of inspiration is to step into a seemingly impossibly vast and potentially schmaltzy universe. But for Charlotte Yonga’s recent body of work, Naam Na La, her focus remained beautiful in its simplicity. The Barcelona-based photographic artist shot the work during a residency at Fondation Blachère in Senegal, taking the title from a Wolof expression meaning ‘I long for you’. For Yonga, the phrase captures the mercurial nature of this sometimes tender, sometimes fierce emotion.
“I spent a month with this word ‘love’ in mind, taking a very intuitive approach,” she tells us. “Then back in Europe, while I was discovering my developed films, one of the models I shot messaged me with ‘Naam Na La’, which echoed with love as it moves me and as I had unconsciously wanted to reveal it. Love experienced through its feeling of immensity and eternity as much as through its inconsistency, lack of and flaws. The love that can also be uncertened, troubled or ambivalent.”
“Love is experienced through its feeling of immensity and eternity as much as through its inconsistency, lack of and flaws”
Yonga grew up in rural France, studied at Ecole nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris Cergy and has lived and worked extensively her father’s homeland of Cameroon as well as in Morocco and the US. This trip in 2021 was her first time in Senegal and as soon as she touched down in Dakar, she felt a connection to its natural landscapes, interiors and people as she found herself surrounded by “oceanic views and decors metaphorising hope, promises, fecundity and infinity.”
The resulting images capture precious moments between couples, families and friends as well as individuals deep in contemplation, all of whom exude qualities of “realism, strength and fragility”. These empathic portraits mix with a taste of the wild landscapes, community infrastructures and cosy homes that drew Yonga’s attentive lens and further explore the complexities of love and being loved, of romance and freedom, of intimacy and loneliness.
‘Naam Na La’ has been exhibited at Photoworks Festival in Brighton and Luxembourg Art Week and also speaks to Yonga’s wider practice, which includes film and sound projects as well as painting and “therapeutic sketches”. All of these are tools this ample talent uses to open up the intricacies and sensitivities of our human condition.
Read Nataal’s 2018 interview with Charlotte Yonga here.