Distribution

This vast artist’s book began with a deceptively simple question: how do you photograph a forest? Daniel Shea found that forests presented a revealing challenge: that of capturing the whole – the immersive totality of being in nature – when photography so relentlessly pulls us to the fragment. Over several years and across varied geographies, he made photographs with deliberately constrained methods – rendering dense woodlands with a telephoto lens, capturing cities only through the window of a moving car – as if to invert the old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees. These working constraints foregrounded what resists representation: ecological complexity, social entanglement, and the architectures that influence both. The resulting book, Distribution , explores the tension between environments that overwhelm with density and patterns that slowly emerge through repetition, accumulation, and framing. It opens with a series of portraits of Jessica, a woman who represents the statistical median of a person living in the United States, before expanding outward to surfaces, buildings, trees, and eventually groups of people. It asks how we locate subjects and attendant problems in a world shaped by competing density and dispersion. Includes a short story by Catherine Lacey