By Taylor Dafoe, March 10, 2026
"I like to say that I’m the most futuristic artist,” Dan Estabrook says in the opening line of an artist statement for his recent show at New York’s Gitterman Gallery through March 28, called “Forever & Never”. This is a strange claim, given the prints on view, which are not only not futuristic, but almost exclusively made with 19th-century photographic processes. Yellowed, faint, crisp: they look like they belong in an antique store drawer, not on the walls of a gallery on the Upper East Side.
“Forever & Never” brings together work from Estabrook’s new monograph of the same name (Artsuite, 2026). His prints are made with albumen, carbon, salt—materials not commonly used since the invention of the Kodak camera in the late 1800s. His insistence on these outmoded processes hints at fetishization, though never enough to imbue the work with the frisson of kink. These are not sexy pictures, but quaint experiments with medium and process that altogether make for a charming, if slight, meditation on photography’s capacity to collapse time.
The show is small; so are the prints, most roughly the size of a laptop. Many have been modified in some way—alternately pierced, painted, and scribbled on, and usually to surreal effect. These interventions, combined with Estabrook’s preferred subjects—ghostly figures, floating hands, empty mirrors—evoke the stuff of old carnivals and magic shows, perhaps a cabinet of curiosities. “The Blind”, a 2013 carbon print, features two identical figures superimposed, sharing a second eye, while an untitled 2001 salt print depicts a faded orb hovering above a top hat. In “Small Fires”, a gum bichromate print from 2012, a woman sports a headband of flames.
What are these pictures showing us? It’s easy to describe, hard to explain. Inside these scenes, Estabrook goes on to say in his statement, “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.”
Estabrook’s reversed telescope metaphor is timely. The more our moment advances, the more it feels like it's regressing, hurdling toward a future that looks disconcertingly like the past —a 21st century shrouded by the darkest chapters of those that came before. It would be a stretch to say that’s what these artworks are “about.” In no discernible way are Estabrook’s pictures political, after all; they are not confronting the contemporary or really anything at all. But if this lack of modern signifiers makes the prints seem out of step, it’s also their strongest quality.
There is a simple comfort to the stubborn tactility and antiquation of Dan Estabrook’s work. Everything about them is anti-screen. I don’t think the future will feel anything like the artist’s visions, but I would sleep a lot better if it did.
Taylor Dafoe is a writer and photographer. His work has appeared in BOMB, Cultured, Frieze, and Interview, among other publications.
DAN ESTABROOK "Knot", 2004 ©Dan Estabrook, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.
DAN ESTABROOK "Small Fires" 2012. ©Dan Estabrook, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.
DAN ESTABROOK "The Blind" 2013. ©Dan Estabrook, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.
DAN ESTABROOK "Untitled" , 2001. ©Dan Estabrook, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.
DAN ESTABROOK “Nine Symptoms: 5 Fever” 2001. ©Dan Estabrook, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.