Michella Bredahl spent ten years photographing the people she calls family. Love Me Again, her first monograph, gathers that work: friends and acquaintances pictured at home, texting on unmade beds, curled against the cold, rummaging through a medicine cabinet, waiting for the bath to fill. Across 56 color plates, the Danish photographer and filmmaker works in a documentary register that is patient rather than invasive, holding poses that are languid and gazes that do not perform. The subject is feminine energy as lived daily life—sexuality, safety, and ordinary domestic fact bound together without editorializing.
The book’s authority comes partly from biography. Bredahl grew up in a turbulent household in Høje Gladsaxe, outside Copenhagen, and was scouted as a model young enough to learn what it meant to be looked at by someone else’s desire. Her portraits reverse that arrangement. Working with long-standing intimates, she finds the missing parts of herself in others and builds, in the rooms they share, a space where femininity is not defended or explained. The lineage she joins—Goldin, Day, Sarfati, Lawson—is a useful marker, though Bredahl’s contribution is distinct: warmth without sentimentality, softness that keeps its edge.
The book argues quietly against the stories that portraits of women are usually asked to carry. It refuses clichés of empowerment and resistance and offers instead the unresolved detail: a room in disarray, a body at rest, a friendship held over years. Stephanie LaCava contributes an essay; Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume at Loose Joints Studio.
For collectors, the object itself merits close attention. Loose Joints issued the 120-page book in October 2023 as a section-sewn debossed landscape hardcover with tip-on, at 29 by 27 centimeters—a format that lets these horizontal scenes keep their domestic proportions across the spread. Bredahl’s work in film and photography, supported by grants from the New Carlsberg Foundation and Statens Kunstfond, has been widely covered; Love Me Again is where that vision first takes book form, and where the sequencing of a decade of portraits becomes an argument about intimacy as a sustained practice.
