Artsuite announces the publication of Forever & Never, a new monograph celebrating the work of Dan Estabrook, who for 30 years has been expanding the potentials of photography’s traditional “alternative” processes.
The title brings together seminal works from throughout Estabrook’s career, and which demonstrate the expansive, soulful, and oftentimes clever techniques the artist employs to explore relationships between memory, the body, and photography’s romantic pasts.
Forever & Never highlights Estabrook’s deep engagement with 19th-century processes such as calotype negatives, gum bichromate, and albumen prints—methods that the artist expands upon through paradigms of drawing, painting, and sculpture. In a digital age marked by rapid technological advances, Estabrook’s practice stands as a counterpoint, celebrating the tactile and handmade nature of the photographic medium. The work in Forever & Never holds fast as an anchor to the authenticity, curiosity, and soulfulness found in the romance of photography’s magic and materiality.
The monograph is divided into three unique chapters: Little Devils, Ghosts & Models, and Broken Fingers. Each chapter unfolds in a non-chronological, visually arresting format that captures the artist’s playful yet profound approach to storytelling. Little Devils examines the early history of photography, when its processes were intertwined with drawing. Ghosts & Models reimagines the complex and often fleeting dynamic between photographer and subject. Finally, Broken Fingers contemplates the physicality of the photographic object and its parallel to the human body.
Against the rapid proliferation of AI and other advanced image-making technologies, Forever & Never fulfills a growing desire writ large for renewed embrace of authenticity. Through this, Estabrook’s practice carves an important reminder about photography’s enduring traditions and their capacities to serve as a deep force of creative relevancy in the present day.
Dan Estabrook : Forever & Never
Artsuite
First Edition
Edition size: 500
Smyth sewn with die cut hardcover
Page count: 212 pp, 90 plates, 6 die cuts
Size: 11.35 x 9.1 inches (28.83 x 23.11 cm)
ISBN: 979-8-89443-361-5
$65
https://artsuite.com/products/dan-estabrook-forever-never
