Forever & Never by Dan Estabrook

Issue 181

Forever & Never presents a selection of photographs from the last 30 years, organized exactly as I’ve always hoped to show my work — not in any chronological order, but mixed together in a way that allows the recurring themes of my interests to be selfevident. There are visual connections to be made between images, like the many hands or draped cloths, but thematic ones, too — the photographer as magician; the artist’s hand, made obvious through drawing or painting; an active absence, represented here in the book as an actual cut in the surface.

The slippage of time is particularly important to me, since I have often made work that plays directly with the history of photography. Could this strange picture be something from 150 years ago? Little markers of age, like stains and creases, help support the fantasy, while I hope to make clear that all photographs unmoored from their context are subject to the whims and fantasies of our own obsessions. I love the confusions of the medium, the way every photo taken is like a skipped heartbeat in the body of time, and I create fictions that play on our sense of when a thing is as much as why. I want to draw from the past as much joy as I do loss, making pictures that pretend to some knowledge of a time before, reflecting back a half-remembered dream of who we think we are now.

My photography has always been defiantly handmade — building props and sets, working with old-fashioned chemistry and analog materials, and painting or cutting the final prints, whether paper, metal, or glass. Flattened as they become within the pages of this book, there are evident, I hope, enough markers of their physical life to show that these are no less objects. Even a paper photograph has weight. This collection of objects represents an alternate history of photography, born from my own obsessions. It is a permanent record of a few ephemeral decades of work.

View or purchase the book here.

Dan Estabrook (he/him) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
danestabrook.com | @damnestabrook