Our bedrooms can feel like the most important places in our lives when we are growing up. Our obsessions and burgeoning identities exist so vividly within those four walls; our room is the place we retreat to and hide as well as a site of discovery and self-expression. Especially as teenagers, our bedrooms are our worlds. The following five photo projects from the Dazed art and photography archive all explore the significance of bedrooms, tracing the identities of their absent inhabitants, or depicting individuals at home among their belongings.

MARIA CLARA, IN HER ROOM

Fascinated by the nuances, complexity and intensity of women’s interior worlds, Maria Clara Macri began taking portraits of women she encountered on her “lonely path”. She told Dazed, “I could see how each of those women had something that resonated with me. Somehow, they were all reflections of myself.” Be it Milan, Paris, New York or Los Angeles, she captured her subjects in their own environments, mostly in various states of undress. “Your room is a space of freedom where you can create, write, and read while remaining in touch with your own body and energy.” 

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BARBARA MARSTRAND, STILL LIFE OF TEENAGERS

As a teenager, no place is as sacred as your bedroom. In Still Life of Teenagers, Barbara Marstrand photographed 60 teenage bedrooms across her home country of Denmark. The inhabitants are absent, but the abandoned beds, the shelves of possessions, the strewn clothes, make-up and trinkets are presented like a museum – or a crime scene – which invites us to assemble an idea of the bedroom’s owner. “Bedrooms say a lot about tastes, interests, social position, and ways of relating to the world,” she says. “I love looking at photographs of cluttered homes, so I preferred [the teenagers] not to clean their rooms, as I love the stories that come with the mess.”

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FOTÓMETRO, TELL ME WHERE YOUR FREEDOM LIES

Fotómetro’s Tell Me Where Your Freedom Lies is a series of portraits of individuals in their bedrooms – their safe spaces in which they can express themselves in their own handmade clothes, with their artworks, amid their belongings and personal effects. “My room has always been my safe place, my shrine, the place I can feel free to be myself,” explained Rona Bar (one half of the photography duo with Ofek Avshalom). From a young man trying on a necklace in his girlfriend’s room to a woman sitting on her bed the night before her breast cancer surgery, the images, as Avshalom puts it, portray “the feeling that the subjects are in their natural environments, where they feel comfortable”.

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DAISY DAVIDSON, HYSTERIC ROOMS

“I have always had an interest in how people decorate their bedrooms. It’s such a personal space to many and shows people’s personalities so accurately,” explained the London-based photographer and stylist Daisy Davidson, making their mark documenting British youth trends on Instagram as @hysteric.fashion. Here, they focus on the “sanctuary” of the bedroom and the cute chaos of anime merch and cute plushies. “I have always loved to look at old photos on Flickr of people’s bedrooms, from goths to old-school anime fans. Each person’s room – regardless of the subculture they’re in – there’s always some little detail in personal space that makes it uniquely that person’s,” they explain. “This is something I’m super aware of: a bedroom really is such a special place and to be allowed to photograph people in such a space is something I’m so humbled by.”

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ADRIENNE SALINGER, TEENAGERS IN THEIR BEDROOMS

Adrienne Salinger’s Teenagers in Their Bedrooms was first published in 1995 as In My Room, immediately becoming a cult classic photo book. Last year, 30 years after it originally appeared – and now in an era where teenagers are more self-surveilled and documented than ever before – the series was republished in an expanded edition, with 26 additional photographs and new texts. With walls plastered in posters, wardrobes overflowing, and a melange of pets, soft toys, mementoes and treasured objects, each room is a world unto itself, and this photo book remains a timeless trove of fascinating insights into the mores and obsessions of teenagers.

Read the full story here on Dazed.