Rooms We Made Safe is the second book of the rising star Michella Bredahl, after the now sold out Love Me Again (2023). Rooms We Made Safe is a raw and beautiful collection of photographs and autobiographical and literary texts, an intimate book that spans decades of photography, beginning with the photographs made with the artist’s mother’s camera and the photographs she created in childhood together with her mother. The book weaves together Bredahl’s current work – intimate portraits taken in the sitter’s personal space – self-portraits, her mother’s photographs, and their writing, together with a text by Stephanie LaCava.

At the heart of the work is the dialogue between mother and daughter, one that unfolds through their photographs and writing. What begins as a shared creative act gradually becomes more complicated as the mother, who was once behind the camera, falls deeper and deeper into addiction. The images bear the weight of absence, tension, and the grief of watching someone disappear: someone you can see but cannot hold. They also show how a camera can be a tool for survival. Through a child’s eyes some of these photographs lay bare a fragile dance between love and loss, tracing the shadow of addiction across the face of the mother and revealing the enduring light of childhood. In her work Bredahl re-imagines suffering with compassion. The dialogue continues, fragmented but persistent, held together by acts of looking, remembering, and forgiveness. These are not just photographs: they are emotional spaces layered with memory, longing, and survival. The book explores how places once marked by instability, addiction, and silence can be reclaimed through tenderness and the act of looking. Domestic interiors, female bodies, and familial ties unfold with unapologetic honesty. Bredahl’s photographs and writings are shaped by lived experience, by the blurred lines between love and harm, exposure and protection. Rooms We Made Safe is not a conclusion but a continuation: of a mother’s gaze, a daughter’s gaze, and a legacy held in light. This legacy also informs Bredahl’s current work – with subjects of siblings in a room, pole-dancers in their homes, friends in their bedrooms – which all testify to the power of the female bond and strength, all rendered in a unique photographic style, celebrating the expression of the analogue medium.

The book accompanies a large solo exhibition that will travel from Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography in Amsterdam to Kunstmuseum Brandts in Odense and Frederikborg in Hillerod.

• Rooms We Made Safe, Michella Bredahl
• Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther and Franz König
• Design by Kühle und Mozer
• Texts by Stephanie LaCava, Michella Bredahl, and Maria Bredahl
• hardcover
• 16,4 x 22 cm
• 63 images
• 80 pages
• English