Distribution

Daniel Shea

ISBN 10: 1917651295 / ISBN 13: 9781917651295

Published by MACK, GB, 2025

About this Item

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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781917651295

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Distribution
• Publisher: MACK, GB
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1917651295
• ISBN 13: 9781917651295
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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