©Dan Estabrook, Book Cover for Forever and Never

©Dan Estabrook, Book Cover for Forever and Never

For those who are aficionados of the world of alternative processes as I am, Dan Estabrook’s stunning book, Forever and Never, is a tour-de-force.  From the brilliant open-mouthed cutout on the cover through foiled endpapers depicting a faux photo studio from the past (or present?), one enters a timeless hall of mirrors reflecting the visual drama that is about to unfold.  Estabrook’s oeuvre is photographic theater in three acts with the photographer as magician in a starring role. The hand of the photographer is ever-present pulling more than rabbits from his top hat as he appears and disappears in clouds of smoke and mirrors.  Estabrook employs a wide variety of alternative photographic processes to create this magical realm including calotype negatives, salted paper prints, albumen prints, gum bichromate prints as well as paint and pencil. The book also employs clever cutouts throughout to poke many proverbial holes in the process.

©Dan Estabrook, inside Cover for Forever and Never

But the book is much more than a multi trick pony as Estabrook delves into the layered realms of time and memory, love and death as well as a pastiche of the origins of photography. His chapter titles, Little Devils, Ghosts and Models, and Broken Fingers reveal a playfulness that disguises the underlying seriousness of the themes he presents to the viewer. His found objects resemble 19th-century set pieces and include elements that connect the past, present, and future, often with subtle humor.  One particular sequence of images depicting nine symptoms never defines the illness but points to the pangs and pains of love in a touching array. In Estabrook’s work, the photographer is not only a magician but the disjointed hand that appears throughout the book as a deus ex machina playing with toy boats, holding a glass of wine or primed to grasp a vase full of scissors among many other roles.  The hand intervenes throughout the book to remind the viewer that there is always more than meets the eye, both in the specific image and in the history of photography.

©Dan Estabrook, Discarded Vices from Forever and Never

©Dan Estabrook, Discarded Vices Page Back from Forever and Never

As Estabrook explains, “Using 19th-century techniques and celebrating their flaws and failures, I make seemingly anonymous photographs in order to reimagine a more personal 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, simply in re-creating the past, instead, I wish to make contemporary work inspired by the ever-growing gap between what we know of the past and how we understand the present.

©Dan Estabrook, Portrait, Clown from Forever and Never

©Dan Estabrook, Last Splash from Forever and Never

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.

©Dan Estabrook, Symptoms from Forever and Never

For over thirty years Dan Estabrook has been making contemporary art using a variety of 19th-century photographic techniques, including calotype negatives, salt prints, gum bichromates, and tintypes. He balances his interests in photography with forays into sculpture, painting, and drawing. Dan has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the NEA in 1994. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Instagram:  @damnestabrook

©Dan Estabrook, Baby from Forever and Never