Slant

Amherst, Massachusetts, is a city in New England. Here was born Aaron Schuman, the author of the book.

In the same city was born and lived the poet Emily Dickinson (essentially reclusa), to whom the title of this book pays tribute. SLANT is a reference to Dickinson’s poetry, with its so-called imperfect or sloping rhyme, assonant (in English, “rhyme rhyme”), as well as the relationship between text and image and, increasingly, between the image and the true.

It is the same Dickinson who says it:

Say the whole truth, but say obliqua (“bowed”, ed)
The success lies in moving
Too bright for our sickly pleasure.
The superb surprise of the truth.
Like a lightning made familiar to children.
With affectionate explanation
The truth should gradually dazzle.
or we would all be blind

(From Poesie, trans. It. By Massimo Bacigalupo, Mondadori, Milan 1995)

That is to say: the truth is necessary but can not be said directly. Better to use a round of words, a metaphor, perhaps an image.

However, for Schuman everything starts with reading a small section of the local newspaper of the substantially peaceful city of Amherst. It is called “Police Reports” and contains brief and often surreal reports of criminal or suspicious events in the area.
In the book, Schuman weaves a selection of these cuts with images taken within a fifty-kilometer radius of Amherst.

As the book progresses, what initially seems to be an ironic portrait of a quiet city becomes a reflection with an increasingly surreal, discordant and discordant tone in the emergence of “false news” and, more generally, in what moves below the surface of the city. American contemporary society.