I first met Dan Estabrook when he was working the counter of a skate shop in Boston during my first semester at art school. By the time I dropped out to work at Transworld, I’d spent the greater part of a year skating with him and a handful of locals, making zines, sneaking into his Harvard classes and exploring it’s red-lit subterranean catacombs.

Where I was content to continue exploring our rigged, Letraset® half-tone transfer printing technique for better photo reproduction in zines, Dan dug deeper into tin type, albumen, salt prints and other antiquated techniques and processes.

A lot of us made art at the time. Dan is one of a very few who became an artist in the true sense of the term. Not just because he’s maintained an active presence in contemporary art circles, but because he has continued to live a life of personal creation and expression as fully and consciously as he always did.

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

Desta is showing at DCFA until the end of December.

If you’re in the area — don’t hesitate:

Dan Estabrook, MUSEUM
1 November – 22 December, 2007
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street, Suite 506
New York, NY

Wish I could be there, D.

via: Pathetica (work) / Flickr / DCFA / Edelman Gallery (bio) / Artnet

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