I'm a Different Person on Tuesdays

Words & Model: Alley Lee | Photography: Elena Kasnatschejew

Make it stand out

Home.

It is rarely just a place.

For women, it is a threshold: a physical space that

suspends itself between the self we present to the world

and the self we protect from it.

Japan offers us a language for this duality.

The concepts of tatemae (the public facade) and honne

(our true feelings and desires), describe the human tension

that exists not only within Japanese culture, but within the

interior lives of many women across the globe.

We are all familiar with the feeling: the calculated

arrangement of oneself before stepping outside, and the

unraveling that happens when the door closes behind us.

From girlhood, we begin to familiarize ourselves with such

social choreography. We learn how to enter a room, how

to speak, how to present our ambitions at a palatable

volume. And much of this practice happens at home — in

front of mirrors, through imaginary self-staged

conversations, and in the trying-on of roles we grow up

learning to inhabit. The world is our audience, and our

home is our rehearsal studio.

But home…

is also something else entirely.

It is the stage on which a woman exists in her body

without an audience. A haven where the performance

recedes and the costume is shed. (The prerequisite of the

above being that you are a woman living in solitude, of

course.)

The photo series asks us to consider both functions of

home as real; neither cancelling the other out. A woman's

home is not simply a private sanctuary or a rehearsal

space for the public world — it is both, simultaneously, in

a way that makes it uniquely hers. The identities she steps

into and out of are not masks worn over some single,

hidden "true self." They are all facets of her, and every role

she inhabits is genuine. Yet, beneath and between them,

something endures: a core selfhood that is not defined by

any one role, but that makes all the roles possible.

Womanhood, in this sense, is not a contradiction to be

resolved, but a multitude to be inhabited and celebrated.

We invite the viewers, through these images, to witness, in

the intimate geography of the private space, the beautiful

and ongoing act of a woman becoming herself.