Online Group Exhibition - “Remnants” - Spring 2026
Analog Forever Magazine is proud to present "Remnants," an online group exhibition featuring 28 images created with analog and film processes.
Behlen writes:
“Remnants” brings together 28 photographic works that explore loss as both a personal experience and a broader human condition. Across these images, absence takes many forms: abandoned homes overtaken by time, aging bodies marked by memory and endurance, objects that outlive the lives attached to them, and landscapes suspended between transformation and decay. Together, the works consider how grief, memory, and disappearance continue to shape the spaces we inhabit and the identities we carry forward.
Working through film and analog processes, the artists in this exhibition embrace photography’s material relationship to impermanence. Grain, blur, fading surfaces, and physical texture become extensions of the themes themselves, echoing the instability of memory and the fragility of what remains. Rather than functioning as straightforward documents, many of these images feel suspended between remembrance and disappearance, allowing atmosphere, gesture, and emotional residue to speak as powerfully as narrative.
The exhibition moves through themes of familial memory, mortality, queerness, environmental erosion, psychological fragmentation, and the quiet passage of time. Some works confront loss directly, while others approach it through symbolism, abstraction, or the transformation of physical space. Collectively, “Remnants” reflects on photography’s unique ability to preserve traces of what can no longer be held, offering images not simply as records of the past, but as vessels for longing, reflection, resilience, and remembrance.
— Michael Behlen
GALLERY
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Portrait of Michael Behlen
Michael Behlen is a photographer, curator, and publisher whose practice is grounded in metaphysical and mystical inquiry, exploring perception, temporality, and presence. He approaches photography as a contemplative discipline rather than a documentary act, treating the medium as a phenomenological instrument capable of registering stillness, uncertainty, and internal awareness. Drawing from transcendentalist, existential, and mystical traditions, Behlen situates image-making as a slow, ritualized engagement where meaning emerges through attention, surrender, and patience rather than spectacle or immediacy. In this sense, his work resists the acceleration and disposability of contemporary visual culture.
Behlen’s work is deeply tied to the material and conceptual constraints of Polaroid instant film. Its finite frames, volatile chemistry, and unrepeatable prints resonate with his engagement with impermanence and the passage of time. Rather than overcoming these limitations, he embraces them as essential to the work itself: chemical drift, streaking, and unplanned marks become expressive devices that emphasize ephemerality and unpredictability. Each print functions as a contemplative object, transforming photography into a ritualized engagement with both the world and the self.
Behlen’s Polaroid photography has appeared in publications including Diffusion Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Seities Magazine, and Polaroid Now (Chronicle Books, 2021). He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks — Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1 and I Was a Pioneer. His third book, Searching for Stillness Vol. II, was published in 2020 by Static Age. His forthcoming self-published Polaroid zine, Where the Water Waits, will be released in July 2026. and education.
Connect with Michael on his Instagram.
