This Interview by Michael Behlen was originally published in the 2017 PRYME Edition Annual Journal.

Matt O’Brien is a photographer from the San Francisco bay area, California. His photography explores humanity, the natural world, and societal issues, and it is always about finding beauty, regardless of the conditions. He was born and raised in San Mateo, California. While studying zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, O’Brien was drawn toward creative pursuits, and he realized that photography, rather than science, was a better way for him to explore and respond to the world around him. He has been photographing for over thirty years now. His understanding of animals and of the natural world informs how he views humanity, and it informs his photography.

O’Brien never studied photography formally, but took classes and workshops and learned a lot by doing. He had a black and white darkroom for many years and used to process his own film and print his own black and white photos. He has taught photography at U.C. Berkeley’s ASUC Art Studio, City College of San Francisco, and, in Colombia at la Universidad de Antioquia, la Universidad de Medellín, la Universidad de Caldas, y la Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes.

His Polaroid project, “No Dar Papaya”, spanned from 2003 to 2013, including a stint as a Fulbright Fellow. The project explores the things he encountered during that time which piqued his sensibilities. At first he mostly did portraits, but his subjects began to evolve beyond that to encompass a broader vision of the country. The images come from all over Colombia, from the big cities, to small pueblos, to Caribbean islands, to the remote forests and deserts. The work offers an alternative vision of Colombia-- removed from the images of war, violence, and misery that dominate stories and imagery from Colombia in the international media. That kind of imagery, known as “pornomiseria” in Colombia, is not what interests O’Brien as a photographer, and it doesn’t represent his experience of Colombia, where he found an abundance of beauty, warmth, creativity, and humanity. The photographs reflect his experience in Colombia and his sensibilities, a personal collection of snippets, moments, individuals, and places that together speak of realities and possibilities that exist in Colombia.

Among the awards he has received are a Fulbright Fellowship, a Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Award, and a Community Heritage Grant from the California Council for the Humanities. His work has been exhibited and collected by various institutions including the Library of Congress, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at University of Texas, Austin, the California Museum of Photography, The Fries Museum (Netherlands), and el Museo de Arte Moderno de Cartagena.

Past projects include “Back to the Ranch”, his exploration of one of the oldest ranching communities in the United States, across the bay from San Francisco, and its demise due to urbanization, and Looking For Hope, a collaborative study (photos by O’Brien, texts by students) of growing up in the inner city and the public school experience in Oakland, where he taught for several years. O’Brien’s book, “No Dar Papaya”, a collection of Polaroid photographs which explore the beauty and humanity of Colombia, in Polaroid, was published in 2016 in the U.S. You can still pick up a copy by visiting Placer Press! Connect with Matt O’Brien on his Website!

Interview

Michael Behlen: How was the seed of photography planted in you? When did you begin making photographs? Which camera did you first use? When did you develop an interest in instant film?

Matt O’Brien: I took some pictures with a disc camera and my parents’ Polaroid when I was a kid, and enjoyed it, but the first real explorations with photography were in college. I borrowed my brother’s SLR, might have been an Olympus. Shortly thereafter I bought a Minolta Maxxum 7000. I took classes in which I learned to develop black and white film and print in a darkroom during summer breaks. I really liked creating images. I guess felt I had something to say through photography, and have spent countless hours at it.

My interest in instant film came about through chance, really. Polaroid sponsored a contest in San Francisco in 1998, “Iz It Photography?”, and I submitted Polaroid transfers. I had been at work on “Back to the Ranch”, a photographic exploration of ranching in the East Bay, across the bay from San Francisco, and its demise due to urbanization. I shot that project with Tri-X in documentary style, and it focused mostly on the ranching culture. I did a parallel project to that which focused on the rural lands themselves and the abundance of life they supported, “On the Land”. I shot that project with 35mm slides, but I created Polaroid transfers from those images with Polaroid 669 film and watercolor paper. I liked the impressionistic quality of those images, I felt they were more beautiful and had more emotional power than the 35 mm images from which they were created. I also liked the element of the unknown and uncontrollable that is inherent to the Polaroid transfer process—you never know exactly how it will come out, and no two prints from the same slide are the same. Anyway, I submitted a few prints from “On the Land”, and I won second place. First place was that you got to use the “giant 24x24” Polaroid camera, and second place was a Polaroid 690 camera, which I hadn’t even heard of.

So, had I not won that camera, I probably wouldn’t have become an instant film enthusiast. In retrospect, I am very glad I got second place and not first.

MB: You graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in Zoology. How does your education influence your work? Was there a pivotal point when you decided to abandon the sciences professionally and take on creative work? Perhaps the way you study zoology just changed from research to photography?

O’Brien: I feel I got a great education at UC Berkeley. In addition to all the science classes I took, I also was able to take classes in a variety of subjects including anthropology, Ethnic Studies, literature, and Spanish. A well-rounded education helps you understand the world and other people and cultures better, and a lot of my work has an element of exploring other cultures, both in the U.S. and abroad. I didn’t take any art classes at UC Berkeley, and I don’t have a formal education in art. In some arenas that’s viewed as a negative, but I’m not so sure it is from the point of view of creating artwork. It seems in an art program, there’s lots of emphasis placed on who has done what, and students seem to always have to view and place their work in the context of other artists and movements, and they have to build on it, or reject it, or justify it… I’ve always just been drawn to subjects that interest me and through my photography, I express ideas about those subjects, about the world.

And as far as zoology goes, it very much informs my photography (animals and nature appear in lots of my photographs) and my view of humanity. Humans are animals. We are products of evolution and subject to and respond to the same sorts of things as other animals, though we live in societies that have come up with all sorts of ways to control and suppress some human behaviors. But those are powerful urges/needs—fundamental to life itself, and so, inevitably, people cannot always conform to the rules… That’s interesting to me as a human being and as an artist. I received a President’s Undergraduate Fellowship my last year at Berkeley to study a species of river otter in Costa Rica. Part of my research plan and budget was photography. After my time in Costa Rica, I travelled north to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. I was more excited by the photography than the science. Also, I had professors whom I admired, and I realized I didn’t have the passion they had; I was more drawn to creative and expressive pursuits.

MB: What inspired you to travel to Colombia in 2003 to capture your first series “Royal Colombia” with 35mm Film? How did your expectations of the country differ from the reality of being there?

O’Brien: It was having friends from Colombia that made me want to go there. I knew there was more to the culture than what the media offered, which was stories and imagery of war, violence, drug trafficking and related problems. I was interested in going there in a work capacity, rather than just tourism, because I find when you have something to do, you meet more people and you’re not just observing, you’re also participating, which makes for a richer experience. A friend told me about the beauty contest, and the more I researched it the more interested I became. There are two beauty contests held at the same time in Cartagena—the national contest which has lots of money behind it and is televised nationally, and a local one in which the contestants are from poor neighborhoods and are mostly dark-skinned. So, I thought in addition to being able to explore concepts of beauty, I could also explore ideas of race and class, and it seemed like it could be a lot of fun. I’ve never been drawn to war and violence and corpses, and that kind of photography, and that has/had been done so much in Colombia.

I can’t say I had a lot of expectations. I just went with a sense of adventure, curiosity, and a desire to succeed at my task. It was a unique and wonderful introduction to Colombia—to spend nineteen days photographing a beauty contest that is the media event of the year that was very popular among the masses and that attracts Colombia’s rich and famous… I had a great time. There was tons of press covering the contest, but I was the only foreigner. In those days, there weren’t lots of foreigners in Colombia and very little tourism because it was and was perceived to be more dangerous than it is now, and so I was a novelty, and that can be a fun position to be in.

MB: In 2004, you were invited back to Columbia to exhibit “Royal Columbia” and teach photography at universities there. How did these opportunities come about?

O’Brien: I had met a curator from Medellín in the U.S. a few years before. When I told him I was heading to Colombia to photograph the beauty contest, he said, “Great! When you finish in Cartagena, come to Medllín so you can show me the work.” I showed him some small prints, he loved them and said he wanted to exhibit the work the following year. He also arranged for it to be exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Cartagena and for me to teach in universities in three cities. That curator, Juan Alberto Gaviria, became a friend, and I worked with him on many occasions, and he wrote the introduction to the book.

MB: At what point during your return to Columbia did you envision your idea for “No Dar Papaya”? Did it start out as a concrete idea, or did it develop into one from your time there? When and how did you decide to pursue this project with instant film?

O’Brien: I had brought my Polaroid camera on that first trip because I had a hunch that Polaroid would go well in Colombia, and I made a few images, mostly of beauty queens. Some of them are in the book. So, for the second trip, I was really excited about shooting more Polaroid. I had done tons of documentary photography, and I was ready for a change. The documentary projects would always result in me having too many images (even good ones) that I could ever do anything with, and the projects would become unwieldy. I was tired of that, and I felt I already knew how to do documentary photography, and I was up for new challenges.

Polaroid allowed me to conceive of a project differently. Instead of exploring one topic or community intensely and creating tons of images, I could do a broader, more expansive project yet I would create a lot fewer images. So, on my second trip there, I found myself really enthusiastic about the Polaroid images I was creating and started to conceive of it as a project. In my documentary work I use different lenses including a lot of wide angle, which of course isn’t an option with Polaroid. I enjoyed the challenges of working with the limitations of Polaroid and having to shoot in a very different way—much more deliberate. And of course I love the results—the softness and the distinctive color pallet. As with the Polaroid image transfers, I felt the abstract and impressionistic qualities of the image were better at conveying what I wanted to convey than a “straightforward” photograph. I think people are so used to seeing photos now that they can lose their power, but Polaroid allows people to look differently at a given image. It can help reveal something that a “straightforward” photograph might not.

MB: How did you series grow and evolve over the 10 years you worked on it?

O’Brien: Initially, I mostly shot portraits. Then I began to shoot some architecture, and I really liked the results. It allowed me (and others) to see the buildings differently. And then I started to shoot landscapes too—and this isn’t a camera that people generally thought of as a camera for creating landscapes—and I got really enthusiastic about those too.

As I created more images, I felt I was on a mission, that I had something to say. Then I received a Fulbright Fellowship, and that put a lot more legitimacy to my mission. It’s a wonderful honor to have an organization support you in the realization of your vision. So I traveled as much as I could, given my teaching responsibilities, to explore and make images about Colombia, concentrating on its beauty, diversity, and humanity.

MB: Your series “No Dar Papaya” doesn’t exactly fit the mold of mainstream documentary projects, as it is less exact on subject matter and more about discovering what lies beneath the violent news cycle the world is exposed to. How would describe your approach to capturing the images from “No Dar Papaya”?

O’Brien: It doesn’t fit the mold of mainstream documentary projects is right! In the documentary world, some people don’t get the project or don’t like it or are unable to recognize its documentary nature because it is Polaroid. The photography world is strange that way, and there are all kinds of gatekeepers with all kinds of motives. But, as a curator from Medellín told me, “No Dar Papaya” is a unique photographic record of Colombia.

Thanks to the internet and to PRYME, I see lots of great work created using Polaroid and Impossible films, but I’ve never seen a project of this scope. I guess it’s my background with documentary photography that allowed me to conceive of and carry out the project.

My approach to creating the images was really simple. I was a foreigner in a new country. I already had my sensibilities as a photographer and an understanding of light and composition, how to photograph people, etc. So, I just would make pictures of people and things and places that I found interesting, beautiful, amusing, revealing of the country and the culture, and of course that I had access to. I speak Spanish, and that is key. In the early years of the project especially, when there weren’t many foreigners there, my appearance and accent were kind of disarming and an entry—people could assume I wasn’t out to do harm.

MB: While capturing your series, Polaroid film was going and is now extinct. How did this affect the shooting of your series?

O’Brien: In the first few years of the project I could buy Polaroid 600 film in Colombia for about the same price in the U.S. When I got a Fulbright Fellowship in 2010 to continue work on the project, I was very lucky to be able to buy probably about 40 packs of the film before going. It was no longer manufactured, but the Impossible Store in New York still had some for sale, and it saved me, because I hadn’t stocked up. Later I bought some from Craigslist and other sources.

In the early years it was very common for me to give Polaroid prints to people. In the later years, I had to cut back on that severely not because of cost, but scarcity. Luckily, in the cities there were lots of small photo finishing places, so I would often have the Polaroid scanned and have prints made and then give those to people I had photographed.

Even while the film was still manufactured, I would tend to be conservative with the number of pictures I would take—due to the mechanics of the camera and also to the cost of the film—but after I would be even more conservative because I didn’t want to run out of film.

MB: The title of yours series, “No Dar Papaya”, is a common expression unique to Colombia which means show no vulnerabilities and present no easy target. Did you find that the individuals you photographed actually presented you with the opposite reaction? How did they take to you photographing their lives in the amiss of the chaos that surrounds them?

O’Brien: Generally people were welcoming and up for being photographed. I’m a friendly and considerate person, and usually I would talk with people first, and some of the people in the photos I knew for extended periods of time, so usually if I wanted to photograph somebody, we’d already established a kind of rapport, even if it was of the moment. People generally perceived it as flattering, as an honor, that the likes of me would want to photograph them. Colombia is a very classist society. As an educated, white foreigner, my social class would correspond to the upper strata in Colombia, but I don’t subscribe to the classist ideas people have there. I treat everybody with respect and genuine curiosity about their lives, and I think people could sense that and appreciated that. My approach to portraiture is to let people present themselves as they want to present themselves. I never pose people. It’s a collaboration between them and me, and it’s respectful. I think you get better, more revealing and more engaging images that way.

MB: Can you share with us a positive experience that surprised you and made your heart warm? One that we wouldn’t expect?

O’Brien: I was just south of Panama in El Chocó, a forested area, in a small, remote town. One morning as the sun was rising, I saw an indigenous family along the river—young people, from teenagers to an infant. I went over to them and talked with them a bit and took some pictures, both with a digital camera and my Polaroid. The father was over to the side observing it all. Then he let me know that he would like me to photograph his family with Polaroid and give him prints. It was 2011 and I was near the end of my trip and film was very scarce, but how could I say no? So, I made several portraits of the two families as well as of a mother and infant. After shooting each picture, we watched the Polaroid develop, and it was fun to share that experience with them. They were packed up and ready to go. I wrote the date and my name on the back of the photos and then I gave them to the mother of the infant. As she was about to put them in the woven bag slung over her shoulder, I said, “wait.” Then I pulled some pages from my notebook and fashioned an envelope and put the Polaroids in the envelope. I wanted to convey to them that these photos are precious things. They were appreciative and thanked me and then they walked off in single file along the river and into the forest. I like to think that somewhere in their home in the forest the family still has the pictures and they bring good memories.

MB: What about a negative experience, even if it is not stereotypical? Anything you had to overcome or struggle with? What was the scariest part of your time there?

O’Brien: I got attacked by a guy with a knife. It was in downtown Medellín, close to my apartment. I had walked that street many times at night, but generally by myself. I had figured out that the best way for me to move around the cities was to walk around in tough-guy mode, alert, chest out, confident, looking at everybody in the eye, fearless. It sends a message to would-be thieves to go find an easier target, because it could go badly if you start something with me. It worked very well. I learned that from when I taught in the Oakland public schools. Most of the kids acted tough, but they weren’t all tough. But it was a defensive strategy because if you didn’t act tough, you would be taken advantage of, have your lunch money stolen, etc. It’s about projecting an image.

But that night, I was with a friend, a woman, and we were having a great time, and I was paying attention to her and not to my surroundings. We were laughing, my head turned to her on my right. Suddenly I feel someone pulling my t-shirt violently. I remember my first reaction wasn’t fear but rather, “What the fuck?” because I was not accustomed to walking down the street and having my t-shirt violently pulled, and I didn’t know what was going on. When I look up, there’s a guy, about twenty years old, whose got my t-shirt bunched up in his left hand, arm extended, and in his right he’s got a knife, arm cocked back and ready to plunge it into my chest. There are three other guys of the same age. Until the guy grabbed me, I was entirely unaware of their existence—I did not follow the cardinal rule in Colombia of “No Dar Papaya”. I say to them in Spanish, “What do you want?” “Your cell phone.” “It’s yours,” I say. And one of the guys puts his hands in my pockets and finds the phone, an inexpensive flip phone. The guy was prepared to kill me for a phone they could’ve sold for twenty bucks.

MB: Your series leaves the viewer with feelings of hope and beauty, which seems to be the dotted line connecting the vastly different images of your series. Was this the intent behind your series? Are there any aspects of Columbia that you wish you would have captured in retrospect?

O’Brien: I didn’t set out to create work that offers a different vision of Colombia beyond the imagery of violence, crime, and misery which dominate the media here. It just turned out that way because my work is a reflection of me and my interests, what I respond to. And I am drawn to beauty. I put lots of time and effort into my work, so I want to create something that adds beauty, that can lift spirits, that can be encouraging to people. There’s enough sorrow and nastiness in the world already—I don’t need to create more of it.

You know that saying regarding the news, “If it bleeds, it leads?” Well, I think photojournalists working in Colombia for decades have realized that imagery of conflict and misery are what editors and publications are interested in. Imagery of violence and harsh lives, including sex trafficking and gang life, seem to be what gets photographers lots of notice and seems to win them prizes in the ultra competitive world of photography. Let’s face it, in photography, violence and misery sell. That’s never been my thing. That kind of photography in Colombia is so common, there’s a name for it, pornomiseria. Several Colombian photographers told me they really appreciated my work because unlike all the other foreign photographers who come to Colombia, I didn’t create pornomiseria.

There are regions in Colombia that I never travelled to, and of course I would’ve liked to include images that speak to both the geography and culture of those places, but you can’t do it all.

MB: If you had to count, how many months and years were you in Columbia total? How did the country change you as a person and as an artist?

O’Brien: If I were to count the days over the span of eleven years that I worked on “No Dar Papaya”, I would say I spent about a year and a half there.

I’d been abroad before and I already spoke Spanish before setting foot in Colombia. I have family in Italy and Ireland, and have natural connections to those places. But I had no natural connection to Colombia. So it was a unique experience for me to begin a relationship with a country to which I had no links. You learn a lot not only about the country, but about yourself. You’ve got to figure a lot of stuff out by yourself. You gotta think on your feet sometimes. Colombia’s not the easiest country to navigate. Throughout the time I worked on the project, the country was at war, and that war—fifty years of it—affects the national psyche.

So does crime, both common crime and organized crime (drug traffickers). So you’re dealing with and trying to understand a society that is a lot different from yours, and it can be really challenging and rewarding. It made me appreciate a lot of the aspects of American culture that I had taken for granted, including our work ethic.

As an artist I developed a whole new body of work there, and a new way of working. I also taught a lot in Colombia and was exposed to lots of artists, and I was impressed and inspired by their dedication and creativity. The response from Colombians to my work was also encouraging. Sometimes as artists, we need a little encouragement to know that what we are doing does matter to some people, does touch some people.

MB: When did you realize that your “series” was completed? Was there a moment, a realization?

O’Brien: After my Fulbright Fellowship, in which I worked intensely on the project for six months (the Fellowship was five months, but there were certain parts of the country they wouldn’t let me travel to because of safety concerns, so as soon as the Fellowship ended I travelled to these forbidden zones for over a month) I felt I had a very strong body of work. Were they just gonna sit around in boxes, or was I gonna do something to share the work with the public? So, I worked on the project back home in terms of making chromogenic prints from the Polaroids with the idea of exhibiting large prints, and exploring designs for a book. I returned to Colombia in 2013 to teach and to explore publishing and exhibiting there, as well as to make more images. After that trip, I felt the project was complete. It’s not that I had photographed every corner of Colombia, far from it, but I felt that I had created a body of work that conveyed the ideas I wanted to convey.

MB: How many images total did you shoot through the years on this project? How many made it into your series? Was creating a book of your series different from exhibiting your series? What was the production and workflow process like for this publication in Columbia and the USA?

O’Brien: I’m not sure how many images I created over the eleven years—probably around four or five hundred. In the book there are 198 images, and I’ve exhibited in the neighborhood of thirty. For exhibitions, my vision was always to create large prints (24 x 30”) because I like the presence they have at that size, and they look great large. A book, on the other hand, is an intimate experience. I experimented with different designs, including different sizes, full bleeds, and not including the Polaroid borders, and decided that It was best to conserve the original size and the borders of the Polaroid. I went with a very simple design of photos on white pages, no text among the photos. I like the idea of people just taking in the images, pondering them. As literate people, our eyes tend to go to text first, before we even take in the information the image presents, and I didn’t want that distraction. At the end of the book there is a list of the year and place of each photo, but no captions. I think it’s okay to leave it up to the reader to figure out what he or she is looking at. That’s often the experience one has in a foreign culture—you don’t understand everything you come across, and it’s okay to leave some questions unanswered.

I experimented with sequencing too, ultimately deciding to put the images more or less in chronological order, the idea being that the reader goes on the journey of discovery with the author. There’s a not-so-obvious narrative of exploration. The introduction is by Juan Alberto Gaviria, a curator and friend from Medellín. I thought it was important for a Colombian who knows the work and me to put provide a context for the work. At the end of the book is an essay I wrote, “Expect the Unexpected,” about my experiences in Colombia and creating the work. Each is in both English and Spanish.

It was very important to me to share the work in Colombia first. We were gonna have the book printed in Colombia, and then the publisher told me that he had met with a printer from Spain, and they did better work at similar prices, including shipping, and so we went with the printers in Spain. It was challenging working with people on three continents to get the book done—the publisher and writer of the introduction, as well as translators were in Colombia, I was in the U.S., and the printers in Spain. One shipment of books went to Colombia in 2014 where there was also a series of exhibitions. Another shipment went to the U.S. The book wasn’t launched in the U.S. until later—there was some press in 2016 but the first exhibition was in 2017, and that was the official launch—because I had too much going on. It takes a lot of energy and time to launch a book. I’ve been learning every step of the way…

MB: Your photobook was published in October 2014 in Columbia and in July 2016 in the USA. How would you describe the difference in reactions to your work from each country?

O’Brien: In Colombia there was a very positive response and lots of media attention. Generally people, both the press and the public, loved the idea that a foreigner came to our country famous for problems (war, drug trafficking, violence, poverty) and discovered beauty. Some said that I noticed beautiful things about Colombia that Colombians didn’t appreciate.

In the U.S., there’s been a generally favorable response and there’s been some good press, but because it is a much larger country and there are lots of photography books, it’s a different media landscape and harder to get the book in front of the public. And I think Colombia and Latin America aren’t exactly the most popular subjects for an American audience.

Colombians appreciate my take, my vision of their country. In the U.S. since people generally aren’t familiar with Colombia, it’s also a kind of introduction to Colombia, and I’ve gotten feedback that they had no idea that Colombia was this diverse.

MB: You recently showed “No Dar Papaya” at the Colombian Consulate through the Summer of 2017. With this behind you, what are your future plans? Do you have any series you are currently working on?

O’Brien: Well, I am happy to say that I have been invited to exhibit “No Dar Papaya” at the Colombian Consulate in New York in November. The experience with the exhibition at the Consulate in San Francisco was positive for the folks at the Consulate and for me, and so that lead to the opportunity in New York. I’m very excited about that. I’m looking at that as a sort of east coast launch of the book. It being in New York, I think there’s potential for more media coverage, which is crucial if you want people to know about your book.

I prefer the creative work of a given project—creating images and all the fun and inspiration that comes with that. But there’s also the work of promoting, and I’ve had to devote a lot of time to that because if I don’t do it, who will? I worked with a publicist for a while, but that didn’t work out.

I was in Thailand and Myanmar last year for several months shooting still photographs and I made a short film, For Our People, for an NGO that provides educational opportunities to migrants from Myanmar in Thailand. I would love to do more work along those lines.

MB: Can we expect you to keep working with instant film or do you think 10 obsessive years with medium has put that behind you?

O’Brien: I brought my beloved Polaroid 690 to Thailand with me and wanted to shoot instant film there, but the camera broke. I took that as a sign to take a break from instant photography. I don’t know if it can be repaired, and if not, I would like to buy another. I love instant film, and you can expect that I will keep working with it. But it is unlikely that I would undertake a massive project like “No Dar Papaya”…

MB: Anything else you would like to share with us?

O’Brien: Yes. I would like to express my gratitude to PRYME for its enthusiastic support of instant film photography and for providing a forum for instant film photographers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Behlen is a photography enthusiast from Fresno, CA. He works in finance and spends his free time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two. He has been published, been interviewed, and been reviewed in a quantity of magazines and online publications, from F-Stop and Blur magazine to the Analog Talk Podcast. He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; it’s addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He is the founder of Analog Forever Magazine. Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!