Daniel Shea - Untitled, 2025

Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper
60 x 42,8 cm
Edition 10 + 2AP
Signed and numbered on a separate label

About the work
This photo, taken in Los Angeles, was published in the artist book Distribution, which was published at MACK Books in 2025. 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.

About the photographer
Daniel Shea (1985, US) gained an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, in 2013. In 2018, Daniel was chosen as the winner of the twelfth Foam Paul Huf Award. This annual prize, given to a photography talent under 35 years, consists of an exhibition at Foam. The result was the solo show 453-35 10th Street.
In 2014 Daniel had a solo exhibition at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and a two-person show at Heaven Gallery, both in Chicago. International solo shows include Alt. +1000 (CH, 2011) and Centre for Art and Culture, Aix-en-Provence (FR, 2005). His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (RU, 2012), Museo de Art Acarigua-Araure (VE, 2012), Asia Society, Beijing (CN, 2011), and IUAV Gallery, Venice (IT, 2008).

About buying this work
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For more information or questions about buying this work, please contact the Foam Editions team.

T. +31 (020) 5516500
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