For this week's "Work From Home," we hear from Dan Estabrook, who tells us how he has been working on his photography without a darkroom while teaching virtually. Estabrook often uses 19th century techniques and alternative processes in his photo-based works.
"I don't have a dark room here, which changes [how I work] quite a bit. That said, there is a lot of sculptural work that I'm putting in my next show and all kinds of things that I can still do. I've been working on these large format tintypes, cutting them up and assembling them into even larger pieces. I've been making these big, mixed media collage pieces. There is sort of sculptural element to the things I do anyways, so there is always something to cut, something to saw, something to paint."
"One thing I love about my work is my own mess. There is always stuff lying around so that when I walk in to my studio I can just pick up and get going. I have a sculpture that needs to be finished, I have copper that needs to be cut, I have drawing to finished, I have 19th century love letters to erase, etc."
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.
View more of Dan Estabrook's work here.
