by Gerry Mak in New Photography on Monday 5 April 2010

Daniel Shea’s lens mostly focuses on the ugly, the forgotten, and not always irredeemable sides of American culture — the decaying neighborhoods of Baltimore, the poor and working class people of his hometown of Chicago, and the devastation of the mining industry in Appalachia. His most recent series, Plume, documents the coal-fired power plants of southeastern Ohio, where smokestacks loom over abandoned towns, generic suburban sprawl, and once idyllic farmland.