Dan Estabrook

The first photographs, just baby steps from drawing, exist for me in an ideal transitional state between the rational world of the machine and the more human world of the hand. The very physical materials of the early processes – at first, just paper, silver, and salt – have always seemed to me like invitations to transform my own photographs, to draw or paint or cut, acting willfully on my work in an attempt to cross some divide between the past and the present, or between the real and the absurd. Recently I have been using watercolor-based photographic emulsions, like the Gum Bichromate process, to try to discover some of the freedom of painting in the surface of my photographs and to blur this line even more.

Early photographers sought to correct by hand the technical limitations of their new art, yet over time it is their hand-work that can seem to tell the real story: a rose-tinted cheek could now be brighter than the faded face it once enlivened. In combining the hand-made image with the magic of the machine, my own "corrections" and re-imaginings can begin to tell a tale of their own – a hand holds an invisible sculpture, a braid turns to rope, a painted sea doesn't quite hide what it should.

Using 19th-century techniques and celebrating their flaws and failures, I makeseemingly anonymous photographs in order to re-imagine a more personal and dream-like history of photography, seen from a 21st-century perspective. With these processes, I can create my own “found photos” – highly personal objects in which to hide my own secrets and stories. I am not interested in revisiting the past; instead I wish to make contemporary work inspired by the ever-growing gap

Dan Estabrook was born and raised in Boston, where he studied art at city schools and the Museum of Fine Arts. He discovered photography in his teens through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboarding cultures of the 1980′s. As an undergraduate at Harvard he began studying alternative photographic processes with Christopher James. In 1993, after receiving an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dan continued working and teaching in Illinois, Boston, and Florida, eventually settling in Brooklyn, New York.

For more than fifteen years, Estabrook has worked with historical photographic techniques to explore intimate issues about love, sex and death. In his two series, Night & Day 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 Night & Day, 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

All images from Nine Symptoms are available as 14 x 11" salt prints with ink made in editions of 5 for $3200. Price includes frame.

Images from Night & Day range from 4 x 5" to 16 x 20". All pieces are one of a kind pencil on waxed calotype negatives & salt prints. Pieces range from $1200 to $6500. Prices include frame.

All other images vary between being unique pieces and editions of 3, and range in size from 5 x 7" to 15 x 17". Pieces vary from contemporary ambrotypes and tintypes with oil paint, to calotypes with graphite and salt prints with watercolor. Pieces range in price from $1500 to $6500.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.