Little Devils, no. 4, 2001 by Dan Estabrook; pencil on waxed calotype negative, unique print

Little Devils, no. 4, 2001; pencil on waxed calotype negative, unique print 8 x 10 in.

Dan Estabrook was born and raised in Boston, where he studied art at city schools and the Museum of Fine Arts. He discovered photography in his teens through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboarding cultures of the 1980’s. As an undergraduate at Harvard he began studying alternative photographic processes with Christopher James. In 1993, after receiving an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dan continued working and teaching in Illinois, Boston, and Florida, eventually settling in Brooklyn, New York.

Dan has continued to make contemporary art using the photographic techniques and processes of the nineteenth century, with forays into sculpture, painting, drawing and other works on paper. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994. A documentary on Dan and his work was produced in 2009 for Anthropy Arts’ Photographers Series.

You can see a short film about Dan and his process here, made in conjunction with being a Featured Artist in the 2023 Penland School of Craft Annual benefit Auction. 2024 will see the publication of a monograph, titled Forever & Never, alongside a large exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art.