Rooms We Made Safe

Köln: Walther König, 2025.
Hardcover
First Edition
16.4 x 22 cm
80 pp

Michella Bredahl grew up in a social housing estate on the outskirts of Copenhagen with her single mother and younger sister. At a very young age, the two sisters were confronted with their mother’s addiction, which left a deep mark on them. In Rooms We Made Safe, Bredahl revisits the terrain of her childhood — once a dangerous place — and reinvents it as a powerful artistic expression. Like a writer with a pen, she transforms her camera into an instrument capable of connecting past and present, subject and object.

Rooms We Made Safe is the second book by rising photographer Michella Bredahl, following Love Me Again (2023), now out of print. Rooms We Made Safe is a raw and beautiful collection of photographs, autobiographical and literary texts, an intimate book spanning several decades of creation, from images taken with her mother’s camera to photographs taken during her childhood with her mother. The book weaves together Bredahl’s current work — intimate portraits taken in her subjects’ personal spaces — self-portraits, photographs of her mother, their writings, and a text by Stephanie LaCava.