These bedroom photos offer an insight into the lives of Danish youth

For teenagers, bedrooms are a sanctuary: four walls, a floor and a ceiling to display all of their belongings and cultural obsessions. Barbara Marstrand has photographed 60 teenage bedrooms across her home country of Denmark. While the teenaged inhabitants are absent from the images, look closely and you’ll find traces of their presence. Who is this individual? What kind of music do they like? How do they dress, walk, talk, or think?

Still Life of Teenagers is a new book [published by Disko Bay], presenting snapshot images that Marstrand has been making since October 2021. The self-taught photographer studied sociology at university in Copenhagen, and this informed her interest in youth culture. “[Sociology] fits well with my photographic approach,” she explains. “Visiting these teenage rooms reminded me of doing sociological interviews.”

In Hartmut Rosa’s book Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019), the sociologist presents the idea that the quality of a human life cannot be measured by resources, or moments of happiness. Instead, we should consider our relationship to, or “resonance” with, the world. This deeply influenced Marstrand. “Resonance, as I see it, is about openness and curiosity,” she says. “I felt that photography, specifically the snapshot aesthetic, was a medium through which I could relate to the world in a curious way.”

Marstrand travelled all over the country – to cities, rural towns, and even some of the tiny, barely-populated islands that surround Denmark’s mainland. “As a sociologist, I thought a lot about representation… in relation to class, gender, age, ethnicity and geography,” she says. Mostly, she connected with the teenagers through her own network and word-of-mouth, but also Facebook and Instagram.

The book can be read as a portrait of Danish youth of today, but it’s also universal. Viewers will see their own youth in the stuffed animals strewn beside unmade beds, collections of empty gin and beer bottles lining windowsills, and piles of dirty laundry slung across desk chairs. Marstrand wanted to photograph these objects “in a way that makes them come alive… Bedrooms say a lot about tastes, interests, social position, and ways of relating to the world,” she says.

Still, Mastrand is keen to point out that the photos are shot through a subjective lens. “The project shouldn’t be seen as a representative picture of the Danish youth… because I’ve selected the images from an aesthetic point of view,” she explains. Marstrand’s approach was at once formulaic and intuitive. She dedicated time to getting to know the teenagers, before spending around 45 minutes observing the room and capturing specific details. “I love looking at photographs of cluttered homes,” she says, “so I preferred [the teenagers] not to clean their rooms, as I love the stories that come with the mess.”

The resulting book is like a diary, binded in a soft purple cover with a fold-out design that invites viewers to experiment with image combinations. It opens a door to the lives of contemporary teens, but as it turns out, nothing’s really changed. Technology, music, art and politics have evolved, but in looking at these images, we see that the teen spirit is still very much the same.

Barbara Marstrand’s Still Life of Teenagers is published by Disko Bay and is available is pre-order here now.

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