SCHUMAN, Aaron - Slant

Background information, content

"If you opened the local newspaper in the small New England town of Amherst, Massachusetts, as Aaron SCHUMAN did one day, you might find a section entitled ‘Police Reports’ – succinct and extraordinarily anticlimactic accounts of crimes, suspicious activities, events and non-events reported in the area during the previous week. In his photo volume 'Slant' Aaron SCHUMAN interweaves a selection of these clippings published between 2014-2018, with quietly wry photographs he made within a thirty-mile radius of Amherst from 2016-18, in response to their unintentionally deadpan descriptions.
What began as a genuinely affectionate, tongue-in-cheek take on the small towns where the US-photographer spent his childhood steadily came to reflect the disquieting rise of 'fake news', 'alternative facts', 'post-truth' politics and paranoia in America following the 2016 election. His subtly offbeat combination of images and words, however, was always inclined to create a foreboding sense of unease. In 'Slant', the relationship that has been constructed between photography and text takes its inspiration from a poetic scheme called ‘slant rhyme’, notably espoused by the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson, who also happened to live and write in Amherst. In such a rhyming scheme, 'there is a close but not exact correspondence of sounds, often using assonance or consonance; generally it is used in poetry to give variations and an inharmonious feeling.' Appropriating this literary device, 'Slant' serves as a wider reflection upon something strange, surreal, dissonant and increasingly sinister stirring beneath the surface of the contemporary American landscape, experience, and psyche." (© Mack books, 2019)

About US-photographer Aaron SCHUMAN

Photo books by Aaron SCHUMAN