Elena’s Mom’s Friends

Despite the fact that staying in your mom and dad’s house for longer than a weekend makes you want to asphyxiate yourself with their new polyester curtains, you can’t help but be plagued by revisionist flashbacks of your hometown and the house you grew up in when you’re living all alone far away from home. Those nagging memories are your unconscious trying to tell you that deep inside you actually miss home, or at least the idea of it.

When Russian photographer Elena Chernyak left the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk for Moscow, the new perspective gained from a change in environment became an integral part of her work. These images are from her series My Mom’s Friends, which, as you might have guessed, features portraits of her mother’s gal pals and the women she grew up around. We asked Elena what the deal was with the shiny negligees and she said, ”I wanted to show a specific sense of femininity and something common and typical between these different characters. It’s also about local style preferences in general when it comes to textures, interiors, and colors.” So there.

Words by Milene Larsson