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IHSH-358-IND 5oz Dobby Work Shirt - Medium -$200

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Hi everyone!

As promised, I wanted to post once my new zine was officially available for pre-order.

First off, thank you all so much for the incredible support and kindness you’ve shown toward my Polaroid Reclaimed Blue photographs of Millerton Lake, California. Over the last 3 years, I shot more than 20 packs of this film, almost entirely during storms at my local reservoir, and I’ve finally put together a zine to formally self-publish the series.

I narrowed the project down from roughly 240 images to 25 photographs that sequenced well together into the series Where the Water Waits.

Before I post the artist statement below, I just wanted to speak from the heart for a minute.

It’s been about 7 years since I’ve formally published my own photographic work. Some of you may know that I run Analog Forever Magazine, which has been my passion project for years alongside an amazing group of people. The reality is that projects like AF can completely take over your creative energy at times. You pour so much into helping support and publish other artists that your own work can quietly fall to the side for a while.

Reclaimed Blue changed that for me when I first picked up a pack a few years ago.

It pushed me to revisit a place I’ve been photographing for more than 17 years across digital, 35mm, and Polaroid film, but this time in a completely different way. Because of that, this project feels incredibly personal to me.

And honestly, unlike Analog Forever, which is a very polished, professional publication, my love for publishing originally came from the zine world. A huge inspiration for me early on was Mikael Kennedy and his Passport to Trespass series. That DIY spirit was a massive part of why I started making things in the first place.

So in a lot of ways, this zine feels like a return to form, both creatively and philosophically. It reminds me why I started publishing to begin with.

It honestly feels good to make something for myself again, and weirdly enough, it’s also inspired me to push even harder on the Analog Forever side of things, too. Sometimes you need to take a step back so you can take a step forward.

Anyway, I’m done rambling now.

I genuinely hope some of you will consider picking up a pre-order of the zine. The plan is to begin shipping in mid-July. Details are below!

Statement:

Where the Water Waits is a three-year-long photographic study of Millerton Lake in California’s Central Valley, a reservoir created by Friant Dam in 1942 as part of the Central Valley Project, a federal system built to store, control, and move water across the state. At Friant, the San Joaquin River is not so much carried as it is paused, its flow held in suspension before being released into the canals that distribute water across the valley floor.

All of the photographs were made during storms, when the reservoir is at its most unstable and least legible. Wind moves across the surface of the water, rain compresses the foothills into the atmosphere, and the horizon begins to dissolve. Under these conditions, the reservoir resists the conventions of Western landscape photography: clarity, distance, and mastery, and instead becomes a shifting field of tone and reflection, where water, sky, and land continually fold into one another.

These conditions exist within a longer temporal rhythm that shapes the reservoir over time. Between years of abundance and years of drought, the lake expands and recedes in cycles. Shorelines advance and withdraw, continually redrawing themselves against the foothills. What appears fixed is, in fact, provisional: a landscape shaped as much by variability as by control, defined through accumulation and absence.

The work is made using Polaroid Reclaimed Blue, a monochromatic instant film produced by Polaroid as a limited experimental batch from salvaged production materials. The emulsion was never intended to exist as a permanent stock and renders the landscape almost entirely in shades of blue, stripping away the descriptive color that typically anchors an image to a specific time and place, while echoing early photographic experiments with light-sensitive chemistry.

What remains is a landscape that resists being fixed in time. The reservoir holds not only water, but a set of conditions that shift between visibility and obscurity, stability and change, control and uncertainty. In these images, the act of looking becomes provisional, shaped by the same forces that continue to alter the land itself.

Specs:

- 5" x 7"
- 32 pages
- 25 Polaroids
- 128gsm Glossy Art Paper
- Linen Laminate Soft Cover
- Limited to 200 Signed and Numbered Copies
- $25 + Shipping

Link: https://michaelbehlen.com/Shop/where-the-water-waits

This is the final new image from my long-running experiments with Polaroid Reclaimed Blue at Millerton Lake, California. Over the last three years I’ve photographed this landscape almost exclusively during storms, working through nearly twenty packs of film while returning again and again to the reservoir in conditions where the horizon begins to dissolve and the water resists certainty, becoming less a landscape than a shifting field of tone, weather, and atmosphere. Now, finally, the film is gone.

Which means it’s time to make the work into a book.

For a long time I’ve carried the idea of returning to the form that first shaped so much of my relationship to photography and publishing, and that process is now taking shape through “Where the Water Waits,” my first zine in seven years. The project gathers the culmination of these storm photographs into a sequence centered on waiting, instability, drought infrastructure, and the strange stillness that exists just before water is redistributed outward through California’s Central Valley.

Thank you to everyone who has connected with these blue storm images I’ve shared here over the years. I’m deeply excited to finally bring them into printed form.

Hi All,

I am trying to find the name of a material of a cover stock (soft cover) for a zine I am making. The example I have is from zines by Mikael Kennedy from 2013. (THE ZINE GOAT)! Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thank you!

Part 2 of this past weekend’s traveling the remains of the 2020 Creek Fire. The last set was super moody and these are too, but have a slightly different vibe. Thanks for all the love!