Distribution by Daniel Shea

A photobook by American photographer Daniel Shea.

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.

A new landmark work by Shea that showcases the full breadth of photobook techniques in a work of remarkable refinement. Recommend.

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Title: Distribution
Artist: Daniel Shea
Publisher: MACK, August 2025
Format: Embossed linen hardcover
Size: 215 × 270 mm
Pages: 392
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-1-917651-29-5
Price: ¥17,600