Dan Estabrook

Forever & Never (Artsuite), Dan Estabrook’s excellent new book, looks like the relic of an arcane religion or, perhaps, a magician’s memoir in pictures. Typically, Estabrook’s images are difficult to pin down to a time and a place. Although they are dated from 1992 to 2024, they appear to have been found—unearthed, discovered—rather than newly made. In large part, that’s due to the antique processes Estabrook uses; his pictures are callotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, or salt, albumen, gum bichromate, and platinum palladium prints, often finished with watercolor, gouache, or pencil. “It has never been my interest simply to revisit or revive the processes of the nineteenth century,” he points out at the start. “My past didn’t actually exist in the past. It is a reinvention of a time that never was. I want you to be fully aware that you’re looking at a fake relic, in order to see that history itself is artificial.”

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Rarely do I find an artist’s monograph achieves something greater than a well-edited selection of images and a contextual essay. Dan Estabrook’s Forever & Ever does exactly that. It presents his work from the past three decades as almost a sculptural object that reminds us of the expressive potential of the book form...

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