Michella Bredahl’s intimate portraits of her friends in their homes

A woman lies back on a bed, naked but for a bra and scarlet satin high-heels. Her face is hidden, but her ribs jut upwards, as she holds an old landline to her ear. Another woman leans back on her knees, face raised and eyes closed as if in supplication, while her young daughter rests her head on her stomach, clasped in between her mother’s knees. This is a moment of stillness amid chaos – the scene is set in a playroom, and scattered toys surround the pair.

Similar scenes recur throughout Love Me Again (published by Loose Joints), the new photobook by Danish photographer and filmmaker Michella Bredahl. In a later photograph, a woman lifts a fluffy grey creature aloft, its tiny bundle of a body resting on her raised heels, as plaster flakes from the lilac bedroom wall behind them, and a crowd of clothes lie in a heap, totally ignored. The overwhelming impression is of people utterly wrapped in their own worlds – enclosed, yet also unconfined; fleetingly free.

Throughout, Bredahl’s photographs hover and flip between defiance and tenderness; Love Me Again seems to revel in vulnerability, but also holds space for moments of quiet joy. In a brief text closing the book, the writer Stephanie LaCava suggests “there is no urgency for Bredahl”. And it is true that, just as her subjects seem to exist in their own worlds, they also appear to live by their own timeframes – loosening and unspooling under the patient gaze of Bredahl’s lens.

“I have always felt that vulnerability is a strength,” Bredahl says, and it is clear this ethos frames the whole book. Yet, what also frames it is friendship, community and true intimacy – Love Me Again is dedicated “to my mother, my sister, my friends”, and the photographs it contains are of Bredahl’s close friends and chosen family. “Photography is so intimately bound to me, so it happens quite naturally that I photograph those around me,” she explains. “I find it difficult to photograph without it having a connection to me. The camera is like my heart.”

Similarly, Bredahl suggests she is drawn to domestic spaces and interior settings because of her childhood. “I lived with my mother in a small apartment in a vulnerable area in Denmark,” she says. “We were teenagers with parents from all over the world. My neighbours were from Somalia. My best friend’s parents had fled from the old Yugoslavia.” In her primary school class, there were children with parents from Pakistan, Turkey, and Iraq. “I would spend my days after school with my girlfriends at each other’s apartments, dressing up and putting makeup on each other,” she says. “Our apartments were almost identical, but they were different worlds. Different beds, sofas, and carpets, depending on our parents’ tastes and cultures.”

Now, Bredahl relocates many of these spaces in her photography. “My mother would spend a lot of time in her bed, so the bed has gained a lot of value for me,” she notes. Her mother was also the one who first handed her a camera. “She used to ask me to take pictures of her in our apartment,” Bredahl recalls. “I would photograph her in all the rooms in our apartment.. My mother was not well and, together with the camera, I probably became a kind of refuge for her; a place where she could create a world she could endure being in.” This interest quickly developed into Bredahl photographing her younger sister, and later her friends. “The camera was a way of expressing myself,” she tells Dazed. “It was also a way to hold onto something sustainable, while everything else around me was chaos.”

“[Nan Goldin] has been a place of hope and solidarity for me. I would look in her books and feel like I belonged in them” – Michella Bredahl

Yet, while Bredahl’s photographs are clearly tinted with the nostalgia of childhood memory, there is also something iconic, even vaguely religious in her imagery – in the repetition of watery scenes, and pregnant bellies and babies, bathtubs and beds. Her couples pressed together and mothers holding their children close. “I think my work has this duality,” Bredahl agrees, “which are references from my childhood and references from art. I grew up in the suburbs alone with my mother and sister, without access to art, but later found my own way and have used art as a refuge.” Growing up in what she describes as “a very misogynistic environment,” Bredahl professes to having seen female energy exploited and abused from a young age. In response, she turned to “books, paintings, film and photography, especially stories about women as a shelter”.

Over time, Bredahl’s friends have also come to understand her photographic language. “They don't clean up before I come,” she says. “They know that I think it's beautiful that you see details from a life lived in their home.” She says they let her photograph them “as they are,'' and “invite me all the way in and to all places”. This intimacy allows for mutual experiment. “Sometimes I have an idea for a portrait, but it doesn't work, then we laugh about it,” Bredahl says of these collaborations. “Sometimes I have taken pictures of them, they don’t like and then I don’t use them.” Ultimately, Bredahl suggests the most important thing about working with her close friends is that “there is a huge amount of respect and trust in how I see and photograph them”.

“When you take the time to photograph and return to the same people and places, life begins to become visible,” Bredahl notes. “The artists I look up to are those who spend time in their work.” She cites Chantal Akerman’s “masterpiece of slow cinema” Jeanne Dielman, but the artist her work seems to align with most closely is Nan Goldin. “She has been a place of hope and solidarity for me. I would look in her books and feel like I belonged in them,” Bredahl says. “All the love she has for her friends in her pictures was contagious for me. It was a community I could dream of entering.”

In many ways, Love Me Again feels like that dream realised – depicting a community Bredahl is fully immersed in, and a creative language also led by love. “I want the people in front of my camera to feel like they are being treated like humans and that their different personalities shine through,” Bredahl says finally. “That’s what I want to honour.”

Love Me Again launches on October 19 from 6-8pm at delpire & co (13 rue de l'Abbaye, 75006 Paris, France).

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