8oinks

Dan Estabrook discovered photography through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboard culture of the 1980’s. He worked with Christopher James, from whom he learned alternative photographic processes as well as ways to combine his disparate artistic interests. Working exclusively in 19th century processes, Dan Estabrook produces intimate, yet compelling photographs that illustrate the beauty of long forgotten methods. (via)

Just one hundred years ago, science could still claim palmistry, phrenology, and physiognomy among its disciplines, and even today we tend to believe that written on the body are the keys to decipher the secret language of the everyday. There is science, too, in photography — mixing salt and silver to represent the otherwise unseen details of the natural world. By processes physical and chemical, it is even possible to distill one’s breath, capture time, and give a material life to the immaterial. It is this alchemy that moves me. Using and emulating nineteenth-century printing techniques, and making visible the very physical materials of which photographs are made, I attempt to have seemingly anonymous photographs become highly personal objects. In these images a single repeated shape, a formation of flowers, or the patterns of dust and decay are almost legible texts, inscribed on the skin of paper, tin, and glass. — Dan Estabrook

via morbid anatomy