The photographic mysticism exhibition, juried by Michael Behlen, was in the online gallery from February 1 to March 31, 2026. The juror selected thirty eight images from eighteen artist for the exhibition. Brian Van de Wetering’s Face the Wind received the Juror’s Award. Susan Isaacson’s image Izzy Stardust received the Director’s Award.

Juror’s Statement

To jury Photographic Mysticism was to enter a space of deliberate slowness, to witness what happens when instant film is treated not as novelty but as a serious photographic medium. The submissions arrived as evidence of a shared resistance to visual acceleration: a refusal of the disposable digital image, and a return to photography as tactile encounter, devotional gesture, and metaphysical inquiry. In a culture where images are endlessly produced yet rarely inhabited, these works insisted on presence. They asked to be contemplated, not consumed.

What moved me most was the breadth of approaches that still honored the spirit of the call: instant photography as a ritual and a form of thinking. Across a wide range of subject matter and processes, artists demonstrated an uncommon willingness to surrender control and allow uncertainty to become meaning. Many extended the medium beyond exposure alone, physically revising the image through deliberate, inventive applications, including the transformation of original instant photographs through emulsion lifts, transfers, and other interventions that re-situate the photograph as object, surface, and artifact. These gestures did not dilute the integrity of the instant image; they intensified it, making the photograph not only a record of encounter, but a site of reconstruction, devotion, and material inquiry. The finest works did not simply depict the world; they translated experience into atmosphere, creating photographs that felt like relics rather than records by embracing the medium’s irreversibility, its chemical volatility, and its imperfections and accidents.

The final selection of 38 images forms a cohesive exhibition not because the works share the same medium, but because they share a deeper orientation: each treats instant film as an invocation of mystery through chemistry, a meditation enacted in light and time. Together, they reveal how instant photography continues to bridge the seen and the ineffable and how it can hold transcendence without spectacle, and intimacy without explanation. This show is, in the truest sense, a form of slow seeing: a collective devotion to what becomes visible only when we are willing to wait.

Michael Behlen, Curator and Publisher, Analog Forever Magazine
February, 2026

link to online exhibition

link to exhibition catalogue