All images by Elena Efremova. Used with permission.

Elena Efremova is a Russian photographer who now lives in Marseille, France with her husband. “I have no professional education as an artist, but I like to paint very much.” she tells The Phoblographer. “I don’t think I’m a photographer. I think I’m an artist in the first place, and a photography is just an opportunity to show my work to the people in the internet.”

I found her work on Behance, and fell in love with a specific project of hers using drawings of cats and making them play into a whole image involving coffee. This comes, quite obviously, from her fondness of cats and coffee. Elena likes spending time in coffee houses and believes that considering how cozy they are, you should find equally cozy animals. “I sense my coffee cats not as simple animals but as guardian spirits of these places and coffee drinks in general.”

Elena likes to imagine and paint the reality she sees into different colors. “It seems to me that this is the aspiration that makes you an artist, it is an opportunity to change the world around a little bit and to feel yourself a co-creator in some sense.”