Daniel Shea’s expansive artist’s book began with a deceptively simple question: How do you photograph a forest? He quickly discovered that forests pose a revealing challenge—how to convey the immersive wholeness of nature when photography is inherently drawn to fragments. Over several years and across diverse landscapes, Shea adopted deliberately limited techniques—using a telephoto lens to compress dense woodlands, photographing cities only through the window of a moving car—as a kind of inversion of the old adage: not seeing the forest for the trees.
These constraints highlighted what resists representation: ecological complexity, social entanglement, and the built environments that shape both.
The resulting book, Distribution, explores the tension between environments that overwhelm through density and the quiet patterns that emerge through repetition, accumulation, and framing. It begins with portraits of Jessica, a woman who statistically represents the median U.S. resident, before gradually shifting outward—to surfaces, structures, trees, and finally, to groups of people. Through this progression, Shea asks a pressing question: how do we locate subjects—and the problems that surround them—in a world defined by competing forces of density and dispersion?
