Michella Bredahl – Love Me Again

Bredahl creates spaces for feminine energy and power through an ongoing, self-reflective practice of tender and intimate portraiture. How do we create safety and empathy through the act of portraiture? In Love Me Again , Danish photographer and filmmaker Michella Bredahl explores feminine energy through a decade of intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances, reclaiming through portraiture an empowering space for this energy to express itself entirely for its own needs and reasons, without shame. Like the lineage of influential female photographic portraitists before her—Goldin, Day, Sarfati and Lawson, to name a few—Bredahl’s portraits arise from a place of introspection and self-scrutiny, finding the missing parts of herself in the arrested gazes, languid poses and intimate spaces of others. Raised in a turbulent home environment within the Høje Gladsaxe Vulnerable Residential Area outside of Copenhagen, the artist eventually found herself before the camera, scouted as a model at a tender age: objectified, gazed upon, subjected to the whims of men and power. Love Me Again is an exercise in taking that power back, by locating the essence of femininity alongside sexuality, safety, and the plain unfiltered reality of her subjects. Bredahl burrows into the safety of the home, showing women and others at their most relaxed, their most languid, their most multi-dimensional and their most natural: texting on their messy beds, cuddling on a cold morning, searching through the medicine cabinet or waiting for the bathtub to fill. Bredahl’s self-chosen family are the people she photographs, seeking a recognition in them where she revisits the trauma of the domestic sphere, creating something beautiful and empowering through the camera, herself and the people she wants to advocate and perpetuate, beyond words and language. With the arrival of a new voice in portraiture, Love Me Again does not attempt to flatten identity and experience to clichés of empowerment, emancipation or resistance, instead showing with grace and solidarity the quiet miracles of contemporary womanhood and the power of feminine joy. Michella Bredahl (b. 1988 Denmark) is a photographer and filmmaker based in Paris whose photography and films are rooted in an auteur-driven documentary style. Bredahl’s intimate connection with her subjects and their stories allows her to capture elements of strength and vulnerability, creating cinematic narratives of empowerment, love, and beauty through her lens. Bredahl graduated from the International Danish Film School, with her graduation film Chassé selected for the International Rotterdam Film Festival. Bredahl is the recipient of grants from the New Carlsberg Foundation and Statens Kunstfond of Denmark, and her monograph with Loose Joints will be her first publication. 120 pages, 290 × 270 mm, 56 colour plates Section-sewn debossed landscape hardcover with tip-on With an essay by Stephanie LaCava Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints Studio Published by Loose Joints LJ185, October 2023 ISBN 978-1-912719-44-0 Winner of Un/Fund Award 2022 Press: The Guardian W Magazine Dazed i-D Another Mag Document Jourrnal Creative Review Interview Magazine METAL Magazine Fisheye (French) Nylon (Chinese) NYC Launch Thursday 02 November 6–8pm, Dashwood, New York Book launch Thursday 19 October 6-8pm, delpire & co, Paris