As promised in my brass tea news years resolution; a contemporary male artist I had not previously heard of. Admittedly the tip came from yesterday's Morbid Anatomy snippet, but having just completed an early photo history course, this was just too much to pass up.
Dan Estabrook uses only 19th century processes to create his intimate and surreal photographs. He is "working [my] way backwords through photo history to learn how to draw again".
He got into photography through magazines for punk-rock and skateboarding culture, went on to do his undergrad at Harvard and MFA at UNI Urbana-Champaign, and now lives/works in Brooklyn. (His professor at Harvard was internationally known alternative process photographer Christopher James - who I've been dying to work with since high school, but he now works at the Art Institute of Boston where I'd be locked into only photography, something I'm unwilling to corner myself into).
Estabrook says that he wants to "marry the image-making with the process so much so that they can't be separated", that is, to make images that don't depend on the method to be interesting, but that only make sense printed in their historic method. His methods are certainly difficult to overpower, whether or not the viewer has knowledge of the specific process, they are all recognizable as early photographic techniques, and with that comes a certain level of intrigue. There are plenty of artists using these techniques, he notes, and that he does not want to be one whose images only interest is that they were made a certain way.
In my opinion they are successful in this, for not only would his images and compositions be interesting in another media (though admittedly possibly less-so), but what he is really driving at, his themes, are those which have transcended time and affected people always; love, life, sex, death. By using various early processes and placing them in a modern context he is immediately speaking about this.
If you're really interested and want to know more about what actually drives his work, there's a $40 documentary dvd on him, which you can purchase here (there's also a good 5min preview you can watch, from which I got the quotes I've used here).
Estabrook's site
short bio on Estabrook
images: pathetica.net/artwork
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