Idle curiosity alone didn’t create an amateur chemist. Mikkers was a lab tech before becoming a professional photographer. Straight out of university he went to work in the parasitology lab of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, in Bilthoven, Netherlands.

The job was all he’d worked toward — it met his desire to help people and exercised his scientific curiosity but, still, he found himself wanting more. The lab work was fascinating but the lab was a controlled space condusive, of course to hard science not free-wielding art.

“It is hard to be creative in such an environment,” says Mikkers “Everything is, and must be, controlled by protocols at all times. I figured out for the first time in my life that my creative mind was telling me to set it free, and to continue with all my side projects I was working that time.”