Geray Mena photographs two carpenters in their Paris workshop

If you share a studio with a friend or a co-worker and happen to be reading this on your lunch break, please take a moment to flash them an affectionate glance. Why, you ask? Because if anything can help you to view your relationship differently, it’s photographer Geray Mena with this sweet series Atelier.

Geray spent a period of time last year training as a carpenter in a studio in Paris’ infamous banlieue, where he met this very nice pair who both quit studying at a young age to learn their trade in carpentry. Having spent a most of their lives working together in their studio, they’ve forged a strangely intimate and loving relationship, captured perfectly by Geray. Surrounded by heavy-duty materials, bedecked in ripped denim and with battered hands, the photographs are at once awkward and familiar, and if that one of them sharing a limby hug doesn’t have you tearily offering to get the next round of teas in I don’t know what will.