NATAAL

Nataal grew from silent family moments. Through portraits, archives explorations and visual experiments, this intimate series explores memory, identity, and cultural hybridity.

NATAAL
Nataal means “image” in Wolof.

“I am six years old, lying on the woven mat in the courtyard of my family home in Senegal, next to my grandmother. We do not speak the same language, yet I read stories in her eyes.”

This project was born from the fact that I never spoke Wolof. Over the years, this gap proved to be fertile: it led me to invent another language, made of images rather than words. Through photography, I sought to transform this silence into imagery , to create a visual transcription of a nonverbal language, a way of giving form to what I had always felt rather than spoken.

By capturing lived moments, recreating memories, and staging my relatives, I try to weave a personal narrative thread within which cultural memory and imagination intertwine. Light, color, clothing, and textures become my visual language and give rise to characters that are both enigmatic and familiar.

The series reflects this in-between space: a hybrid identity, where the ordinary can sometimes feel slightly uncanny and intimacy raises questions of cultural mixing and rootedness. It also connects to a broader experience of being part of the African diaspora, where individual trajectories unfold across multiple territories and inheritances.

I explore the fragility and impermanence of images, both in their materiality and in what they carry. Through alternative prints on fabric and monochrome editions, these “imprints” capture moments in flux and allow heritage to meet material form, echoing an intimate quest made of fragments, traces, and recompositions.

By combining staged scenes, spontaneous captures, archival work, and visual experimentation, this intimate series explores cultural memory, identity, and cultural hybridity.

• This series was awarded by the Prix Picto de la Photographie de Mode 2024, in Paris.

Yama Ndiaye is a 25 years old French Senegalese photographer born in Paris. Immersed in an artistic world from childhood, thanks to her Senegalese painter father and her visual artist mother, she developed a strong interest in visual creation and a heightened sensitivity to color and light. A graduate of Gobelins Photography School 2023, then she won the Grand Prix Picto de la Mode in 2024 and is a finalist in the 40th International Festival of Hyères (Villa Noailles). She devotes her time to personal projects, on the line between fashion and documentary photography, exploring the themes of diasporic representations, identity, family and memory. She also has a strong interest in the materiality of the image, and her work shows a real interest in archives and various printing techniques.