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
