Danish photographer Michella Bredahl was raised within the ‘vulnerable residential area’ of Høje Gladsaxe, outside of Copenhagen. Her photography has expanded to serve as both a reflection and a projection of her life, using friends and collaborators to dissect, process and heal the wounds of a turbulent childhood. Like other renowned female portraitists who preceded her—Goldin, Day, Sarfati and Lawson (to name a few)—Bredahl’s photographs act as echo chambers for strength and forgiveness. On a rainy evening in Paris, friend and colleague Katie Brown sat down with Bredahl at L’Area (one of their favourite bars) to discuss Bredahl’s upbringing, exploration of femininity, ideas around shame and what it means to truly observe someone.

KATIE BROWN Hi Michella! I have to preface by saying I love you. Now, I want to start by discussing the bedroom, which is such a loaded room. You elevate it to a space that demands respect. In the bedroom, we create the whole world. We rest, put children to sleep, make love, eat, sleep, mourn, grieve, cry, relax. It is a place for both performance and authenticity. As adults, I think we get totally preoccupied with the link between femininity and sex, which can affect how we feel about our interior spaces. What about the bedroom fas-cinates you?

MICHELLA BREDAHL First, I want to thank you Katie for setting up this interview and giving me the opportunity to talk about my work. As we are also working together on another project that expands
on everything in this interview, it feels extra special to share our conversations publicly. It feels like
you know me very well. Like a family member. I feel very fortunate to have met you and I want you to know that before we start.

But yes, I want to give power back to the bedroom. I also want to replace the sad memories I have of women in the bedroom. Growing up I would go to museums and see all the reclining female nudes painted by men. Their posture gave the impression that they were being waited upon, attended to, or served. They were positioned to convey a sense of entitlement and power.

My mother’s bedroom was far from elegant. I never associated the reclining figure with anything positive. My work reflects the duality found in ‘the woman in repose’. It reflects two opposing ideas: harsh realism [on the one hand] and upliftment or celebration. The work references historical women and opulent femininity—minus the objectification.

It’s about making a new language in photography. I want to make people feel beautiful, loved and safe. I read an interesting text recently about sexualisation. It was about how being sexual is an internal emotion. Being sexualized is something being put on you. Consent is the basic idea that someone has power, choice and autonomy over their own body. Being sexualized without consent takes away that autonomy, which is scary and threatening. But if you give someone you trust consent to sexualise you, that affirmation can be really empowering and validating. Being sexual can mean different things to different people. So, I want to capture people who have control of their image, whatever that looks like. I work with people to capture them when they feel most beautiful, whether that is really relaxed or really sexy. You can walk around any gallery and see so many pictures of sexualised young women taken by men, but we do not often see women taking sexual, liberated photos of each other. I think women should be responsible and credited for nurturing a feeling of sexuality to help destigmatise female desire.

KB Do you enjoy having people sleep in your bedroom?

MB I actually find it difficult to invite and host someone in my room for a sleepover, but I fight against it and do it anyway as a repetitive practice. I felt a lot of shame around being viewed in the bedroom. As a child, I was always on edge in my room, waiting for someone to come in and disrupt me in some way. When you are from an unstable home you blame yourself for everything. I thought everything that was happening was somehow my fault. Now, when that feeling arises and I am home with a friend, I try to be open and honest and tell them. I have learnt to say, ‘I don’t feel good right now.’ I want to be open about shame arising and work through it instead of suppressing it and letting it control my life. This vulnerability is also where the name of my book came from. Please Take Good Care of Me was the working title before we changed it to Love Me Again.

KB It must have been difficult to be raised in a place where you were expected to deal with extremely mature emotions in very mature situations. There seems to have been no line between child and adult. There is a slight warping of this boundary in your photos, do you see this?

MB Lots of people in my photographs look like they could be of many ages. I love this. There is a broad spectrum of people at all phases of life. They are so vulnerable yet so strong. I feel as women there is so much pressure for us to be perceived a certain way. I want to be able to capture people’s spirit. In the book, there are people from all situations and places that share a special strength. It’s like they have a secret. They don’t have to be conventionally presentable. They are free. They reflect back to me all the different parts of femininity, of myself.

KB Many issues are rooted in childhood. It is so important to reflect on them even though we cannot go back and fix them. All we can do is try and nurture the aspects of ourselves that didn’t get the attention they needed.

MB Yes, exactly. I long to go back to the time before my parents got divorced. When my grandmother was alive, we lived in the countryside with lots of space. I really long for the sense of having my family safe around me. I miss my mum from that moment, and I feel like I lost that version of her. I remember feeling extremely attached to my mum. Suddenly, we were just living in a vulnerable area [Danish social housing]—me, her and my sister. We weren’t doing well but there was this strong feeling that it was all we had. She painted all the rooms crazy colours and filled them with fake flowers and bright paintings. We have joked about there being two types of people in life: people who religiously make the bed and people who don’t. I think I am drawn to the messier people who don’t prioritise a clinical, strict space. Now, if I shoot in a white room, I register a strong emptiness. That’s why I love to shoot in places that are full of people’s personal history. I attempt to make a small return to a distant life. I have always felt that you have superpowers.

KB I wouldn’t be surprised if one day you told me you could fly or set things on fire with your eyes. What do you think your superpower is?

MB Haha, thank you! I guess some kind of laser vision. I think I have the ability to see behind the bad in people. Behind everyone who seems difficult in some way, there is usually a survival tactic. When I was with my mum, I learnt very sincerely how to see the goodness in all people and empathise with their suffering. I was a terrible child and when I received the love and the care that I deserved, I became the person I was supposed to be and that I protect to this day. My mum had so much potential and was so abused by people that she never got to become the person she was supposed to be. To be able to want to see the good in everyone, even when it’s really hard—that is a superpower.

I try not to judge people because you never know what walking in someone’s shoes for one day would feel like. My mother would hide everything and pretend that things were good. I grew up seeing the facade that people show to the world and realised that it is rarely true. We all have this duality and this tendency to mask over our suffering. Maybe this links to why I have this urge to get behind the four walls and explore stories from peoples’ true lives.

KB The camera is inherently exploitative, in the sense that there are always two figures: the observer and the observed. What do you think about exploitation in photography, especially when it comes to women’s bodies?

MB Photography is inherently exploitative. You are eating someone up with the camera, regardless of how much consent you have been given. Mary Ellen Mark once said, ‘Be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.’ If people are a part of the creation, then it can be liberating.

Before I understood this idea, I had an issue with a close friend who also had a difficult upbringing. We would test each other’s boundaries and we would trigger each other. In a way, we were creating an abusive image without knowing it and we would both feel bad. I would go to the edge with her without any boundaries, without respecting the relationship between photographer and subject. I wouldn’t always register what was happening and we would push each other to a point where we were both feeling terrible and neither of us knew how to communicate our boundaries. We finally told each other that we both had the same feelings and worked really hard to find a language that ensured she felt safe, and I felt like I was getting good, true work.

Sometimes she would need me to listen and comfort her without taking photos. Just exist in her presence without the mania. We both like going far and pushing each other, so it is an exciting and successful collaboration when it works. But I have to submit and recognise that I am not the one in front of the camera. It’s not my image.

Once you take a photograph it ceases to exist just for you; it can be re-interpreted endlessly by everyone that sees it. It becomes an unreliable documentation, like a memory. Do you feel a personal link between your photographs and memories?MB When I photograph, I am trying to revisit memories through visual cues and triggers: things that I see, like places or spaces that I have been to before. It’s how I choose places to shoot. I will see something that triggers a memory. I am obsessed with capturing time and documenting its passing.

My mum had a huge box with photographs of our lives together that I didn’t see until I was much older. If that box didn’t exist, I would never have known what my grandparents looked like. When I first saw them, I realised how important photographs of people you love are. I had an early understanding that people can disappear when they die. It’s easy to lose track of someone once they move away or leave you. That urged me to photograph and keep a kind of diary about the things that were happening. It was a way to control the flow of people that were coming and going from my life. Collecting images of people is like building a treasure box. I feel like I can validate how much I love someone by photographing them. It’s just a way to say very clearly: I see you, you mean something to me and I am really interested in creating a way to hold on to this memory.

KB As we get older, we sometimes feel like we are becoming more like our parents. Do you feel like you are becoming more like your mother? What aspects of yourself remind you of her?

MB Age has given me the strength to understand her and to forgive her. I now realise that life is so hard and difficult. As a child I couldn’t understand how com-plex everything was and the things she was dealing with as a single mum with two children. She had no parents. No family to help her. I couldn’t even imagine having kids and I am ten years older than my mum was when she had me. I empathise with her struggle and I forgive her.

We lost contact for many years because I was so angry and couldn’t see a way that we could have a relationship. I realised that even though I am very different from my mum, she carved a path for me to be who I am. She got sober for me and I realise that now that I am older. By choosing to sober up to, she started the process of ending our generational trauma and hav[ing] healthy relationships.
My mum had her addictions and I have mine. She didn’t have the tools to manage her addictions but now I do. I can funnel my energy into photography. She taught me that you can control the crazy person inside of you. Like walking a tightrope, you just have to stay upright and not fall. You have to constantly be awake in your own life. I am very sensitive, like she is, so I stay disciplined to protect my art and my work and not become too destructive.

Next week I am flying to Denmark to visit her and my sister who is pregnant with her first child. I am bringing my camera to photograph them. To document how much of a miracle it is to be able to say that sentence.

KB Finally, what does photography feel like to you?

MB It feels like liberation and childood. It makes me deeply happy. It feels
like total freedom.

Michella Bredahl’s first book of photography, Love Me Again, is published by Loose Joints and available to order at loosejoints.biz