Photographer Valentina Polovnikova is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Childhood Home. Farewell’. To see Valentina’s body of work, click on any photograph.

My childhood was spent in an ordinary city apartment, but the rejection of the city with its high-rise buildings and apartment isolation forced me to spend as little time there as possible. I often spent the night at my grandparents’, where I found something of my own, something native.

As a teenager, I moved in with my grandmother permanently, and this was one of the happiest periods of my life. Everything is real here, something that was not the case with my parents.

My future husband came here on the first day of our acquaintance, my mother and sister grew up here, and a year ago my grandfather suddenly died there. My grandmother could not cope with the unexpected loss, and a month after my grandfather’s death, the house was put up for sale.

It was so bitter for me to realize this that I began to photograph every corner of my home to remember it as it was in childhood, to preserve those moments that were gone with the house forever. These captured memories will become my support to move on…

Valentina Polovnikova is a photographer, a member of the Union of Photo Artists of Russia, a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for young authors, a participant in group and personal exhibitions. She graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a degree in photojournalism. She is published as an independent author in regional and federal media. She pays special attention to long-term projects dedicated to the inner world of a person and family memory. As a photographer, she cooperates with charitable foundations. She works in the genres of documentary and artistic photography. She lives and works in Tomsk and Moscow.

All images and text © Valentina Polovnikova