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.
덴마크 출신의 사진가이자 필름메이커인 미셸라 브레달 Michella Bredahl의 첫 번째 사진집 『Love Me Again』은 지난 10년간 친구들과 주변 인물들을 촬영한 초상사진을 통해 성적인 측면과 피사체의 솔직하고 여과되지 않은 현실을 담아내며 여성성의 본질을 탐구합니다. 또한, 낸 골딘 Nan Goldin, 리스 사르파티 Lise Sarfati, 디애나 로슨 Deana Lawson과 같은 영향력 있는 여성 사진작가들의 계보를 이어받아 내면의 사색과 자기 성찰을 시작으로 상대방의 침착한 시선, 나른한 포즈, 그리고 사적인 공간에서 자신의 결핍을 발견합니다. 『Love Me Again』은 초상사진에 새로운 목소리를 부여함으로써 정체성과 경험을 일상적인 권한, 해방, 저항의 표현으로 단순화하지 않고, 현대 여성의 조용한 기적과 여성적 기쁨의 힘을 우아하고 연대감 있게 보여줍니다.
120pages
27×29cm
Hardcover
English
October 2023
ISBN 9781912719440
