Brooklyn, NY
PHOTOGRAPHY
Dan Estabrook is an artist whose practice ranges from photography, to sculpture, to drawing and painting. He grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, but ultimately settled in Brooklyn after graduating with an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He now splits his time between the city and upstate New York, and between teaching at Pratt Institute and maintaining a studio practice.
Estabrook has held solo exhibitions at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, the University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington, KY, Daniel Cooney Fine Art in NY and the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. This coming fall, he will be the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The exhibition, entitled Forever & Never, shares its name with a monograph being published by Artsuite that is scheduled to be released concurrently with the exhibition. In addition to maintaining a robust exhibition practice, Estabrook is also a dedicated educator. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and a Visiting Artist at Lesley University College of Art and Design, but has also been a regular at the School of Visual Arts in NY and the Penland School of Crafts in western North Carolina, where he’s lead numerous workshops on alternative photographic processes.
ARTIST'S NOTE
“There’s a great flattening of the world in this digital rectangle, where everything is exactly at arm’s length, a distance too close to the entirety of the world, and too far from my body and the things that matter most to me.”
Estabrook’s interdisciplinary approach to photography centers around historical processes. This love for alternative processes - such as Tintypes, Ambrotypes and Salt prints, to name just a few - came from studying with Christopher James at Harvard, an artist well known for his work in this area. Estabrook once said: “I fell in love with working with 19th century processes in the first place because it was all the other arts combined, but with all the weirdness and magic and thinking and messed-upness of photography.”
When encountering Estabrook’s work, there’s an element of questioning and ambiguity. Is this a relic from an earlier photographic history, or a piece of contemporary art? This temporal confusion is by design. Estabrook has spoken about the intentional absurdity of making something in a contemporary context that emulates a visual and material history squarely rooted in the past. The circular, looping logic of his work sets up a number of dichotomies - such as those between past and present, image and object and illusion and truth.
Yet, despite Estabrook’s nod to the past, the work is very contemporary - timeless, even. Love, connection, sex, mortality, transience, imperfection, performance, magic and, importantly, the medium of photography itself, are all visible themes in Estabrook’s work. There is a deep humanity in his practice, one that explores so many of things that make us human, and indeed mortal. However, these weighty and existential subjects are counterbalanced by a playfulness and wry humor that pervades so many of Estabrook’s individual pieces.
To start, can you tell us a little about your history with photography? When and where did your interest in alternative and/or historical processes emerge from?
“I first fell into photography through skateboarding, and the zine culture of the 1980’s — I used to make a zine called Contort with a couple of friends, one of whom taught me to develop and print my own skate photos. I was always an art kid, but to me that was drawing, painting… not photography. So when I got to college and ended up in a photo class taught by Christopher James, my eyes were opened to a ton of new ideas about the medium and what you could do with it. We were shooting plastic cameras, infrared film, messing with the negatives and so on. Pretty soon I was deep into the history and practice of early photographic processes, and that was that.”
In an increasingly ephemeral and digital media landscape, your practice is a grounding and physical reminder of the power of photographic objects. Can you talk a little about your relationship to tactility, process, presence and chance?
“I’ve always had a particular devotion to the physical object. What drew me to the alternative processes was the chance to make photographs by hand, photographs that were also paintings, and drawings, and sculptures. So that’s been pretty hard-coded into the way I work. It’s only lately that I’ve been able to think about it in relation to a wider digital culture, and most of it comes down to a question of how I want to spend my time. I often say, “Why would I want to make art in the same place where I do my taxes, and write emails?” There’s a great flattening of the world in this digital rectangle, where everything is exactly at arm’s length, a distance too close to the entirety of the world, and too far from my body and the things that matter most to me.
Beyond that, I have a great unrequited love for time — it’s always slipping just out of reach, and I want everything I make to contain some of that desire for her, so to speak. If there’s anything we know for sure about time, it’s that the past gets a little more lost behind us every day, and things tend to fall apart. So I enjoy digging around in that space, making slightly broken things from a time that never was, but could have been.”
Your book Forever & Never is divided into three discrete, but connected sections - “Little Devils”, “Ghosts and Models”, and “Broken Fingers”. Can you elaborate on some of the primary thematic and conceptual drivers of your work? And do these ideas impact how you approach the pieces formally / materially?
“Well, I don’t know that artists ever really move as far as we think we do, even when we believe our work is making great leaps in new directions, so I have to acknowledge the themes that keep recurring in my work, even after thirty years. I don’t always work in traditional photographic “series”, but I do make loose groupings, usually centered around an exhibition or a process. When I was playing with painting watercolors on Salt Prints, everything coalesced into a body of work I called “At Sea”; when I was making Calotype negatives and thinking about the pre-history of photography, I exhibited them as “First Photographs.” I always want the process to be directly related to the ideas within the images — a paper print can be like skin, but a tintype is solid, like bones. But in everything I do, I come back to some of the same images and ideas (or they come back to me) with, I hope, some new understanding of what they mean to me — scissors and hands and blank spaces where things have been taken. Whatever I do, there’s always something about sex, death, and the slippage of time. For the book, I wanted to play more directly with this muddled sense of time, by mixing up even my own chronology and looking at how the work might speak to itself now, across different bodies of work.”
Who are a few artists/writers/thinkers/etc. that have impacted the way you think about your own work the most? And is there someone right now that you're particularly excited about?
“ Aside from a natural obsession with historical and vernacular photographs, most of my inspiration comes from other media, especially sculpture. Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois were early influences, for their strength and wildness and messiness, I think. Other sculptors like Doris Salcedo and Jeanne Silverthorne showed me how much the object in space was able to connect my mind to my body in a way I always wished I could do, even though I am decidedly a photographer… And I’ll always have a fondness for the surreal and the gothic, from the painter Michaël Borremans to, more recently, the photographer Tereza Zelenkova. Mostly, however, the greatest impact on my work comes from teaching, not only in the way my students keep me connected to the contemporary moment, but in the tough questions we ask of each other.”