For more than fifteen years, Dan Estabrook has worked with historical photographic techniques to explore intimate issues about love, sex and death. In his two newest series, Sleep and Nine Symptoms, he continues his use of antiquated processes – the calotype paper negative and salt print positive – turning the camera on his own body as he examines his wants, desires and fears. In Sleep, Estabrook presents images which obscure the division between the cognizant and dream states, as figures emerge and disappear into fading backgrounds, body parts levitate and dreams sprout visibly from a woman's pursed lips. In Estabrook's sleep state, one loses control, exposing secrets and flaws only realized upon waking.

In Nine Symptoms, Estabrook tackles the emotions he has experienced falling in love. With pieces titled "Shortness of Breath," "Heart Rate Increase," "Fever" and "Loss of Appetite," Estabrook evokes old medical photographs to directly confront the passion, obsession, apprehension and excitement brought on by love, as well as its loss. By employing the techniques and metaphors used by nineteenth-century practitioners, Estabrook is able to comment on the timelessness of his concerns and the enduring fascination with love, sex and death.

Just one hundred years ago, science could still claim palmistry, phrenology, and physiognomy among its disciplines, and even today we tend to believe that written on the body are the keys to decipher the secret language of the everyday. There is science, too, in photography -- mixing salt and silver to represent the otherwise unseen details of the natural world. By processes physical and chemical, it is even possible to distill one's breath, capture time, and give a material life to the immaterial. It is this alchemy that moves me. Using and emulating nineteenth-century printing techniques, and making visible the very physical materials of which photographs are made, I attempt to have seemingly anonymous photographs become highly personal objects. In these images a single repeated shape, a formation of flowers, or the patterns of dust and decay are almost legible texts, inscribed on the skin of paper, tin, and glass.

-- Dan Estabrook, 1998