Namsa Leuba: the photographer who dressed fashion models in Guinean ritual masks
The Swiss-Guinean photographer behind Ya Kala Ben built a decade-long institutional career on staged portraits that fuse West African ceremonial masks with fashion styling, well ahead of any Okasen market data to track her by.
Artist spotlight · November 5, 2026 · Okasen Research
Photo by Mario La Pergola on Unsplash
Namsa Leuba: the photographer who dressed fashion models in Guinean ritual masks
Namsa Leuba builds a picture the way a stylist builds a look, then puts a ceremonial mask where a model's face should be. Her 2011 series Ya Kala Ben, shot on a trip to her mother's home city of Conakry, Guinea, stages that collision deliberately: traditional West African masks and body paint, lit and posed like a fashion plate. The series won the BCV award and still anchors how she is written about today.
Who she is
Leuba was born in 1982 to a Guinean mother and a Swiss father and grew up near Lake Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. She trained at ECAL in Lausanne, taking a photography degree before going on to study art direction, according to her own biography and gallery materials (could not verify the exact years of the second credential; sources describe it loosely).
Ya Kala Ben means "Crossed Looks," and the title is the argument. The project reads West African ceremonial objects through a Western fashion lens, and it did not land as neutral at home: some viewers in Guinea considered the work blasphemous, and Leuba was reportedly arrested while shooting it. She had already picked up First Prize at the Planches Contact festival in Deauville in 2010, and followed Ya Kala Ben with the PhotoGlobal Prize at the Hyères festival in 2012. Later series, including The Kingdom of Mountains and Zulu Kids, kept the same visual grammar: ritual object, fashion styling, a camera that refuses to pick a side.