Michella Bredahl Inherited Her Photographic Curiosity From Her Mother

""There's a noticeable point where the photos stop being of me and start being by me," says photographer Michella Bredahl as she reflects on her earliest memories behind the lens. "My mother had always photographed me, but when I was about seven, something changed. She gave me the camera and I began photographing her - cooking in the kitchen, sleeping in the bedroom. That's how it all began. In the rooms of our home.""

""We didn't have much growing up, and I think, deep down, I believed that if I just kept photographing, maybe it would lead us somewhere, somewhere better," says the Danish photographer, who continued to take photos as she grew up. "Sometimes it even feels like I've held on to a camera out of desperation too. Like it was the one thing I had, the one thing I could rely on to make sense of the world.""

""The idea behind introducing my mother's photographs together with my work was to explore how things are tied together through time - memory, relationships, the body - as well as to examine how deeply connected my practice is to my mother. Bredahl was raised single-handedly by her mother, who had to work several jobs to stay afloat. "She had to put her own dreams aside," the photographer tells us, "she never had a chance to pursue her creativity.""

Michella Bredahl began photographing at age seven, taking a camera from her mother and photographing domestic scenes. She used photography to make sense of scarcity and to imagine better possibilities. Her work centers on family, femininity, intimacy, and the domestic sphere, portraying moments of joy, fragility, and struggle. A museum solo exhibition, Rooms We Made Safe, displays her work alongside her mother Maria Bredahl's earlier photographs to examine connections across time, memory, relationships, and the body. Bredahl's upbringing by a single mother who sacrificed her own creative pursuits informs the project's emotional core.

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