Dan Estabrook – Forever & Never

“I like to say that I’m the most futuristic artist. This may seem absurd for someone working almost exclusively with 19th-century photographic processes, but I am not here trying to recreate some forgotten Golden Age or to resurrect the past. I am drawing into being scraps from an alternate history, lost through time and found again, now stained and broken and worn. This is a history seen through the wrong end of the telescope, or caught in the rearview mirror, hinting at revelations only possible now, through the passage of time.

The works collected here present themselves as found objects from this apocryphal past. They are simple pictures, really — portraits and still lifes, each one tethered to the present by pencil or paint, or cut just so. Darkbright voids reflect the view. The ghosts are present. The sea fades to show the artist’s hands. Photographs lie, but the hand is true.

I am not chasing the latest technologies in image-creation — that should be obvious! — running two steps behind their own rapid obsolescence… No, the future I evoke is more certain than that, and contains one constant truth: everything falls apart. With time, the facts are forgotten, the pictures fade, and the past suddenly acquires new meaning: a clearer understanding, soon replaced by another, better one. And now, Photography itself risks obsolescence while we look away, letting the pictures generate themselves. Maybe this is the future I’m looking for anyway: every Photograph only as true as a dream.”

Dan Estabrook

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 11 am – 6 pm, and by appointment

Exhibition Duration 07 February – 28 March 2026

www.gittermangallery.com

Location:
Gitterman Gallery
3 East 66th Street, 1B
10065 New York, NY
United States