A Conversation on Daniel Shea’s Distribution

Image from the series "Distribution"©︎Daniel Shea

Photographing Forests

Yukihito Kono, hereafter YK: Today, I would like to focus on Distribution, your latest photobook, which was published last August. You have previously produced important works dealing with cities and environments. This work also includes cities and nature, but I understand that the project began with the forest as its starting point.

Daniel Shea, hereafter DS: This book started with a very simple premise, which was to photograph forests.

I had spent years working on books about architecture: what architecture means in the world, and what it reflects back about our values and the world around us.

But honestly, I was a little bit sick of working on photographs of cities, and I felt the need for a change of environment. So I started trying to photograph forests, and very quickly it turned into a problem, because it was very hard to capture the experience of being in the forest.

That became the starting point for the book. When you are in the forest, your experience of it is one of being surrounded by the whole environment. The environment you are in defines the experience, whereas photography, for the most part, has a tendency to fragment things. Squaring those two things was the first problem.

Spread from the book "Distribution "©︎Daniel Shea

YK: Did the period in which you began making this work overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic?

DS: That was honestly a coincidence. I had started photographing forests just before COVID hit, so there was an uncanny timing to it.

One thing that the pandemic brought into perspective was the amount of discussion around environmental issues. For me, though, it was not so much that there was a moment of pause in the natural world that I found interesting.

I feel like this was covered in the news around the world: ecosystems seemed to be restoring themselves, and even in cities people were seeing animals. In that sense, there was a renewed focus on environmental issues.

That added another dimension on top of the forest pictures. For me, the initial problem was a very simple one. It was not that photography was trying to create something, or that photography wanted something. Photography does not want anything. It just is what it is. But its fragmentary nature was the initial problem I was interested in.

Then COVID happened, and there was a renewed interest in environmental issues. I was thinking about that a lot, and it ended up mapping onto this other problem of the fragment versus the whole.

If climate change unfolds slowly, and we are unable to perceive changes day to day, making it difficult for us to act, that structure also maps onto the problem of “seeing” in photography.

YK: When you first conceived of this work, did you already have in mind that it would become a photobook?

DS: When I start working, I am always thinking about whether it will become a photobook or not. Or rather, I think I always have the next book in mind. Books are a central part of my practice. They are the thing I am most obsessed with and most interested in, even more so than exhibitions.

At the same time, I also have a kind of double life. I work as a photographer as well, and that work often looks very different from my book work.

For me, books do two things. They give me an organising principle for the way I work over the long term. And I am also simply interested in the medium itself. It is almost an obsession.

Jessica: An Embodied Abstraction

YK: I think this book visually expresses the significance of photography, and of the photobook today. When I first read it, I was struck not only by the strength of each individual photograph, but also by the way it carefully engages with the grammar of photobook making, both traditional and contemporary. At the same time, I felt that there was something that did not quite fit within those conventions: a book that follows certain rules, while intentionally introducing elements that deviate from them, and that does not aim to arrive at a conclusion.

DS: The book opens with a series of photographs of a woman named Jessica as she goes through her day.

This section does two things for me. One is a bit more abstract, and relates to what you described as my interest in the structure of bookmaking, in rules, and in breaking rules.

I liked the idea of starting a book that is so rigid in appearance with a detour. You experience the first series of pictures and expect one thing, and then the book shifts dramatically, both stylistically and structurally.

In my mind, this particular detour, Jessica, represents what I would describe as an a concrete abstraction. She is a representation of the median American person demographically. I photographed who I thought that person would be.

The literal person in the pictures is a fictitious person, but the representation, the median American woman, is based on statistical fact. This idea of embodied abstraction brings us back to the problem of the part versus the whole in the forest. It encapsulates a central question of photography, one that I think photography is well suited to answer.

YK: We live in a time when anyone can use AI to generate images or videos quite easily. With statistical data, it is possible to create a realistic fictional person. But here, that is done through photography. The woman who appears in these images is in fact played by an actor, but the photographs record a woman performing a person who exists only in numerical terms. That twist feels different from simply producing fiction. Photography is fragmentary, but at the same time it is tied to the factuality of “that person was there”.

DS: Perhaps now I could do something similar in another way. The data is there, and if you input it, you could easily generate images or even videos. But with photography, you are hiring an actor to become that woman, and it is recorded as a photograph. Perhaps that is why.

I would describe my central interest as finding new forms within straight photography. That means playing a little bit with the conceit, or the premise, of a photograph.

In this instance, it is not that the photo shoot itself is fictitious. I am documenting myself photographing somebody I hired to represent someone. There is nothing false in what is being proposed in the photographs. There is no lie there.

It is subtle, but within that subtlety is the entire universe of what I am interested in with photography and representation. It is not as simple as saying that photographs lie. It is more that truth is elastic. What shifts is not what is in the photograph, but its meaning.

A simpler way of putting it is that the language of these photographs is documentary. But they are not documentary in intention. Whereas later in the book, most of the photographs that have people in them are essentially documentary pictures. I did not orchestrate those situations. They are photographs of people in the world, in their respective environments.

The Materiality of Photography and the Frame

Image from the series "Distribution"©︎Daniel Shea

YK: After the section with Jessica, we encounter a dark monochrome photograph that feels like the entrance to a forest.

DS: If the photographs of Jessica function as a kind of prologue that poses a more philosophical question, then this section is the first chapter in a real sense. This is where the subject is established. One of the central subjects here is the material condition of photography.

The first framed photograph that appears is in a wooden frame. A framed photograph is also a photograph. Then, after that, photographs of wood follow: photographs of the material from which the frame comes. The photograph is presented on a large scale, and that also suggests something. In a very conventional sense, this first chapter establishes the outlines of the themes, subjects, and concerns that unfold throughout the book.

YK: You have previously photographed framed works, or used images that show layers of photography. But in earlier works, those images felt more scattered throughout the whole. Was there a reason for bringing them together so clearly here, almost like an introduction?

DS: There are actually images of framed photographs throughout the book, beyond this section. But it is true that they are concentrated mainly at the beginning.

In general, my books include works that I made while making the book. Saying it like that makes everything sound very obvious. The things I tend to pursue are quite subtle, so whenever I try to explain them, they can sound a little silly.

Sometimes I make works for exhibitions, and sometimes I make works in the studio. At times, they become finished, stand-alone works. That becomes the final form of the work, and it may enter the book as such. As you wrote in your review, this chapter re-establishes a material relationship to photography.

The reason they are concentrated at the beginning is that the original idea was for most of the book to be the central gridded section. In that section, there are of course individual photographs, but the organising principle of how they are seen is the book itself. The page organises groups of photographs, and the page or spread itself becomes almost like a photograph. So it did not make much sense to include many images of framed works there.

But I did include some. For example, in one spread in the gridded section, one of the few moments where an image of a framed work appears, it breaks the frame. The structure of the book is very rigid, and I follow that structure most of the time. But sometimes I do not. This spread is one example. A grey grid is overlaid, marking the zones where an image could exist. But there is not necessarily an image there. In this case, the frame breaks that space and those rules.

To put it more simply, a frame formalises what is inside and what is outside. That is the most interesting part of framing photographs for me. The convention of framing indicates that something has been placed in a frame and is important enough to be preserved. But when you frame a photograph, the idea of inside and outside is doubled. When you take a photograph, you choose what to put inside it. Everything else exists outside.

Grids, Memory, and the Quantity of Images

YK: From here, we enter the gridded pages that form the core of the book. This section has a very strong impact. After all, the grid continues for roughly 200 pages.

Spread from the book "Distribution "©︎Daniel Shea

You have used grid structures as a method before, and you have also arranged works in grids in exhibitions. Where does this interest in the grid come from?

DS: The grid, to put it simply, establishes the relationship between part and whole. If we are thinking about the photobook as a medium, design is at its centre. So it is a question of design, but it also returns to the central problem of the fragmentary nature of photography.

What interests me about the grid is that it allows multiple images to exist together. There are two directions to that. One is more chaotic or random. It strongly suggests that while a subject exists within the photograph, anything could exist outside of it.

But many of the grids are organised by a more consistent principle. Through the combinations of images, new compositions and sequences emerge.

One of the things I like about books is that the experience of looking at a book is based on memory. You cannot see the whole book at once. You could cut it open with a knife, but even then, technically, you could only see half of it. So when we read an art book or a visual book, we are using the memory of what we have already seen, or, if we look through it in a different order, the memory of what we will see later, and bringing that into relation with what we are looking at now.

The grid is, in a sense, like a cheat code. It allows relationships and juxtapositions to be clearly established within a single field of vision.

Spread from the book "Distribution "©︎Daniel Shea

I should also mention the photographs of roads. Much of this book was photographed from a moving car. I was in the passenger seat of cars moving through cities around the world, photographing. Roads suggest movement.

The grid begins with the forest and moves towards the city, shifting back and forth between those environments. But the road always connects those different places. In that sense, it is also a visual tool. There are so many things that the grid can do. The simple fact that you can place multiple images together allows for many possibilities.

Another thing I should add is that, from the beginning, I wanted this to be a book about the quantity of images. It was an attempt to translate the experience of trying to organise the amount of information the world presents to us. There are twelve images on a spread, continuing for more than 200 pages. The book contains more than 1,000 photographs.

A point of departure for this section was Gerhard Richter’s well-known book Atlas . He created a very simple premise there: that anything from his life was worthy of being included.

There were personal photographs of family and travel, as well as more clinical studies and indications of the world. It was a kind of vessel that could accept everything. That book has had a major influence on me for a long time. The works are completely different, but in this section, it was a direct point of reference.

YK: As you just said, looking at photographs and books depends on memory. By accumulating the memory of the pages before and after, we come to hold an image of the work as a whole. Because there are many similar photographs within these roughly 200 pages of grids, the accumulation of memory itself becomes unstable, producing a feeling almost like wandering through a forest, or wandering through a city. At the same time, the book is not simply about the number of images it contains; it makes you feel the significance of the time spent looking.

As the grids continue, text collages also appear. Could you speak about those?

Text Collage and the Competition of Ideas

DS: There are two sections within the grids that do not contain grids. One is this text collage. For the sake of time, I will say that the different texts collaged together represent wildly different worldviews.

For example, one text is a techno-optimist prediction about the future. Another text is by Allan Sekula, an artist, scholar, and Marxist thinker. So it is a competition between ideas.

If the book is an attempt to understand how we see the world and how we establish ideas about the way the world is organised, then the book is one example of a person, me, doing that through photography. These texts present other people’s ideas about how the world is organised, or how it should be organised.

The other section that interrupts the grids is a sequence of images, mostly of roses and construction workers. What is more formal than a photograph of a flower? In a sense, a flower photograph is a quintessential photograph.

The images of construction workers were meant to translate something about their labour. These are the people who build the physical world that I am photographing. And again, this comes back to the question of representation in photography: making people into formal objects. That is one of the problems photographs have, and it is impossible to fully resolve. There is inevitably a kind of reduction involved in photographing something as an image.

Spread from the book "Distribution "©︎IACK

So I was looking for an image that could exist with that problem and point to it very specifically. In that section, extremely formal photographs of flowers are paired with photographs of men working.

As you mentioned, it may be a little hard to see, but in the central part of the book, the chapter with the grids, there is a spot varnish applied over parts of the page. Even when the grid is interrupted, the structure of that varnish remains.

So there is still a sense of structure. There is the possibility of an image existing here, while a larger image is overlaid on top of it. They become like smaller chapters housed within the larger chapter of the gridded section.

Groups of People, Cities, and Society

YK: The next chapter might be described as dealing with the environment in a broad sense, including nature and the city, or perhaps even the Earth itself. Rather than depicting the beings who inhabit it as individuals, the book presents them as groups: young people gathered in a record shop, construction workers on a building site. The photographs seem to move towards the end through a process of classification.

DS: In a way, this book might feel a little boring. So I wanted to reward the reader who spends more time with it by giving them images of people. Through experience, I have learned that readers tend to like photographs with people in them. That is not necessarily my own preference, but it is something I have learned through other people.

I have made many books about cities, and those books often did not include people. In this book, I kept collecting images of groups of people in different situations. It was a way of reminding myself, and the viewer, that people live in cities. The built environment reflects social needs, social desires, and social aspirations. Ultimately, places reflect those things.

Image from the series "Distribution"©︎Daniel Shea

Another aspect is that photographs of groups of people also suggest part and whole. That is the central organising principle of this book. In photographs of groups, collective decision-making and collective activity are taking place. People gather, talk about something, work, do things. As a group, they agree to do it.

There was a version where I placed only portraits at the end of the book, but it did not work. But groups of people, and groups of cars, were able to plug back into some of the ideas of the grid.

To make a slightly meta point about this conversation, the book was intended, when first encountered, to be almost an ambient experience, because there is so much there that it can almost wash over you. If you choose to spend time with it and really engage with it, then the structure points towards themes that start and stop at different points.

Looking at the book chapter by chapter, sequentially, is very interesting to me now. The structure itself was built very intentionally. But in practice, I imagined that many readers would first flip through the book and receive an overall impression of what it contains, rather than reading each chapter carefully from the beginning.

The Contemporaneity Brought About by Literary Imagination

YK: Including what you just said about memory, I think this is a very photographic point. With a moving-image work, for example, a viewer can fast-forward or manipulate the work to some extent, but fundamentally they are asked to sit in front of a screen and watch. With a photobook, that kind of demand both exists and does not exist, or perhaps cannot exist.

You can place photographs in sequence, but they remain fragmentary. And precisely because they are fragmentary, an unpredictable space opens up in the image that emerges when those fragments are connected.

Of course, I do not think this book is boring, but after looking at similar photographs for roughly 200 pages, I did feel a little relieved when this colour photograph appeared.

After the photographic section ends, text appears at the end. It is not a critical essay or theoretical text like the collages, but a short story written for this book. I imagine many people who have purchased Distribution have not yet read it, but I would encourage them to do so, using AI translation if necessary. Could you briefly explain this text?

DS:  The text at the end is a short story by Catherine Lacey. It is a Kafka-style story involving a system that recognises a woman’s face. For example, she receives a traffic ticket, but it was not her. Behind it is an automated system, and she has no meaningful way to challenge it.

She gets caught in a kind of bureaucratic loop. I do not think I need to say too much about how that relates to the rest of the book.

But from the perspective of making a book, there was a feeling that I wanted to reward the reader who had spent time with the book and read it closely. After trying to discern meaning from this huge number of photographs, the text could be a kind of relief: a chance to read something concrete about a single person in a city.

I was obsessed with that story, and thematically it was very deeply connected to what I was experiencing while making much of the work.

And this is a separate discussion, but this book is primarily a book of monochrome photographs. There is something very uncontemporary about that. So it felt important to have a text that situates a person within a contemporary moment.

YK: After reading this text, which deals with the relationship between images, photography, and technologies such as AI in contemporary society — in other words, with the distribution of images today — returning to the book makes the work emerge as something entirely different. Through this literary imagination, the work begins to take on an actual social dimension, rather than remaining simply an abstract photographic work.

The series of portraits at the beginning also becomes much clearer when read through the lens of this final text. As you mentioned earlier, photographs within the grid happen to connect with one another. Text and photograph, and photograph and photograph, begin to echo in the mind, forming new circuits across the book.

In fact, the effective use of text is not new in your work. 43–35 10TH STREET, BLISNER , and this book can be seen, in a sense, as a trilogy. I do not think that was necessarily intended from the beginning, but there are shared methods, and each of the three books includes a text at the end.

In the previous two books, however, the texts at the end were essay-like. This is the first time a novel, a non-explanatory form of writing, has entered the book.

DS: They are different books, but I think they are related thematically. After making Distribution, I realised that it was a kind of trilogy. It feels a little clichéd to talk about it that way, but I do think it is true.

The first two books were driven by a kind of thesis. There was a desire to express something specific about how I see the world and about that world. This book, which comes at the end of that sequence, became more philosophical. It became a book concerned with the experience of being alive. That was my purpose with this book.

That is why I think it is difficult to talk about this book. On one level, I wanted the book to speak for itself. It was much easier to talk about the other books.

Image from the series "Distribution" ©︎Daniel Shea

'Distribution' as an open question

YK: At first glance, Daniel, your works do not necessarily present an obvious formal novelty in each individual photograph. But I feel that you are using existing formats and traditional photographic styles in order to search for new forms from within them.

In your previous works, the themes were clearer: capitalist society and cities in contemporary America, for example, and a critical perspective towards them.

With this work, however, there are themes of forests, cities, and photography, but there is no clear argument or answer prepared. It feels as though the act of making the work itself is not only about taking photographs, but about placing them into the object of the photobook and then watching, together with the reader, what emerges from that process.

Looking back, literary imagination had already been introduced at the stage of BLISNER. In BLISNER, it was not introduced through writing, but through the setting of the work itself as a fictional city. Yet, as with Jessica at the beginning of this book, the photographs were made in an actually existing city. In other words, you are photographing a real place while allowing fiction to enter it. I think this kind of twisted structure was already being attempted at that point.

The most telling example is the text included at the end of that book. Its title is “Picturing the Whole”. That title also shows the consistency of your practice. In terms of method as well, there is a productive continuity: placing rephotographed images of prints alongside directly photographed images, or using grids. There is a sense of your interest in repetition, and perhaps even an obsession with it.

And precisely because of that repetition, when something returns, changes in society and changes in the environment become perceptible. Something remains as a sense of dissonance: similar, but somehow different. In this new book, changes brought about by the pandemic, as well as shifts in American ethics and social consciousness, are felt indirectly.

I also think the book shows the possibility of making a work that opens from personal visual inquiry towards society and the world, even without an explicit object of critique or a clearly stated argument.

DS: It is a little uncomfortable to have someone else explain an aspect of my own psychology that I was not fully aware of. But yes, I think that is true. Works build on the works that came before them.

The difference with this new book is that if it is a book about the desire to discern meaning from the world through observation, then it is one example of one person, me, doing that. And the fact that I am doing it through the form of bookmaking is also part of the subject of the book.

The other books ended with my point of view. They ended with my desire to explain something, or to prove something. But this book remains open. It is a book about the process of trying to identify something. I think that reflects something critical about the world.

That is also the uncomfortable part. The older I get, the more I think about the world, and the more I try to respond to it as an artist, the more I feel that I know nothing about the world. It is an old paradox.

We live in a time when actually knowing the world, and naming the things within it, feels important for repairing it. So there is a certain discomfort in sitting with the feeling of being overwhelmed by that.

I think my earlier books had a stronger sense of political resolution.

YK: It feels as though this book marks a certain point of closure for the trilogy. Are there any works you would like to make next, or anything you are thinking about now?

DS: I do not know exactly what it is yet. But I am always working on something. What I can say clearly is that I am trying to close this chapter. I am trying to work on something different.

YK: I am very much looking forward to seeing how it develops in exhibition form as well.

©︎twelvebooks

This article was edited from the transcript of “Daniel Shea & Yukihito Kono,” a talk event held at SKAC on 18 April 2026.

Edited by Yukihito Kono
Interpreted by Reijiro Sawaki
Organised by twelvebooks
Supported by MACK and SKWAT

▶Purchase Distribution
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▶Related Review
Beyond the Banality of Correctness: Daniel Shea’s Distribution
https://www.iack.online/en/pages/book-review_distribution