Distribution

Distribution

Daniel Shea • MACK

This edition of Distribution

ISBN-10: 1751297934 · ISBN-13: 978‑1917651295 · 2025

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Completeness 45

Cover quality: good

2manybooks editorial

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.

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Other editions of Distribution

• Hardcover · 2025 (this edition)
• Hardcover · First Edition
• Hardcover · 2025
• Paperback · First Edition
• 2025

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