Small-Town Secrets

SLANT (2019), photographer Aaron Schuman’s new book, combines documentary photography with found poetry excerpted from the newspaper police blotter of Amherst, Massachusetts—an archetypal New England town known for its quaint scenery and for being the birthplace of poet Emily Dickinson. Schuman, a native of the nearby college town of Northhampton, invokes Dickinson in his epigraph, which also lends his book its title: “Tell all the truth / but tell it slant–.”

Like Dickinson, Schuman invites readers to consider images that have a plainspoken surface but evoke deeper complexities. His photographs and police clippings are quotidian yet incongruous, creating a kind of visual poetry from what seems like the straightforward stuff of daily life. This deep looking generates a reciprocal appreciation for the weirdness beneath otherwise ordinary surfaces, and for the incredible dynamism of “truth”—not just truth in the grand political sense, but truth in the everyday realities that confront us.

Schuman is an artist, writer, and curator based in the United Kingdom. His previous photobook is FOLK (2016). He has written for Aperture, Foam, Frieze, the British Journal of Photography, and others. This interview was condensed and edited.

Your title and epigraph suggest that what follows in the book is truth, perhaps of a slanted kind. What are your thoughts on the power of truth or its role in contemporary discourse?

Truth is often misunderstood as being something that’s clear, simple, singular, objective, and straightforward, yet it’s a human construct that’s as malleable, ambiguous, and subjective as any other human concept. In both historical and contemporary photographic discourse—and particularly within what’s often referred to as “documentary” photography—the confusion over what truth is has consistently been problematic. Photographs (particularly those understood to be “documentary”) are often assumed to be clear, objective, direct, and straight translations of truth or reality, yet time and time again, photographers have asserted that photography is a subjective medium, and that photographs are often much more ambiguous, multi-dimensional, and multi-layered than they first appear. 

Do you have a sense of what Dickinson meant by her poem, and how do you apply that to your work? 

When I first (re)read Dickinson’s poem while working on this project, it seemed to offer a much clearer and more accurate explanation of my own photographic interests, understandings, and intentions in relation to notions of truth. It encourages the “truth-teller”—in my case, the photographer—to consciously and openly approach truth in a slanted and circuitous way, and to allow one’s truths to “dazzle gradually” rather than “blindingly.”

Given my understanding of Dickinson’s life and times—please note I’m by no means a Dickinson scholar—she was raised in a rather conservative Calvinist household in New England during the 19th century, studied at a seminary as a young woman, and was often preoccupied with notions of sin, death, God’s judgement, and immortality. My assumption is that the truth Dickinson addresses is what might be called a “higher truth” in specifically religious or spiritual terms, rather than day-to-day reports or recordings of the earthly activities of her contemporaries. Nevertheless, I think her guidance in these matters is useful in regards to our definitions and understandings of truth today, and it’s certainly relevant in terms of both the everyday truths, and perhaps greater truths, that I’m seeking and striving for in SLANT.

The police blotter excerpts are from a four-year span; presumably there were many that didn’t make the cut. Can you describe what qualities you looked for while making your selections?

I love the complexity of presenting information from a perspective that’s both direct and ambiguous, and therefore open to interpretation. I started collecting the police reports from the Amherst Bulletin in 2014; initially, I found them amusing and curious, but I wasn’t sure what I would do with them. I felt they contained potential in terms of a project, particularly in terms of making photographic work. Partly, this was due to the recurring character of the photographer, who appeared repeatedly in a number of the reports:

“SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY: 5:53 p.m. – A woman called police after being approached by a photographer in downtown who asked if he could take pictures of her feet. The photographer was not located.”

“SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY: 11:03 a.m. – An Amherst woman told police a neighbor who has behaved in odd ways is using a camera to photograph her home.”

“9:19 p.m. – A man asleep inside a vehicle parked at the Immanual Lutheran Church parking lot was awoken. He told police he was attending a photography conference at UMass, couldn’t afford a hotel room and would be driving back to New York City in the morning.” 

Partly, this was due to the fact that many of the reports were visually suggestive or descriptive, and immediately imprinted a photographic image onto my imagination:

“CITIZEN ASSISTANCE: 4:414 a.m. – A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire.  Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

“11:22 p.m. – Two people sitting on a pile of dirt near the Olympia Place construction site were sent on their way by police.  They told police that they were just discussing their relationship.”

Was it always your intention to use the found language there, or did that arise by chance?

It was due in part to the tone of the reports, which was deadpan and matter-of-fact—something that appeals to me in photography as well, and more specifically, in the history of what’s often referred to as “straight documentary” photography (think Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander). Many of the police reports almost read like a one- or two-sentence story by Lydia Davis, who was born and raised in Northampton (where I grew up), or a classic Imagist poem by William Carlos Williams, whose “The Red Wheelbarrow” is said to have been inspired by the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler. 

When I was reading through the police reports week by week, I was struck by those that leapt off the page in this way—those that, in the context of the newspaper, read as small-town news, but once they’re removed from that context and re-read, or re-appropriated, or reconsidered, become a kind of “vernacular” poem or short story that offers the possibility of deeper, more layered meanings. 

I was also excited by reports of what might be considered “non-events,” or descriptions of things that couldn’t actually be evidenced, verified, or confirmed:

“LARCENY: 5:53 p.m. – A person came to the police station to report $1,200 was stolen after he paid rent for an Amherst apartment that doesn’t exist.”

“SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY: 2:48 a.m. – An Ann Whalen Apartments resident awoke to find someone on her balcony looking into her bedroom.  The woman later told police she thinks she may have been dreaming prior to calling 911.”

This returns to the theme of spirituality and “higher truths,” and perhaps also illustrates the intended slanted relationship between the text and image throughout the book.

There’s something to be said in this work about evidence gathering, the poetics of found spaces and language, and the idea of truth in aggregate; does that resonate with how you constructed this book?

Yes, that certainly resonates with me. As I gathered the photographs and police reports on an individual basis, they seemed to represent strange one-offs, singularly surreal events, atypical sights, or absurd moments. Each felt like an anomaly in terms of the ordinary, everyday status quo of a small New England college town. Yet during the process of editing and sequencing the work, certain motifs surfaced, which led me to group images and text into what might be described as loose chapters. The work suggested themes that exist and are relevant not only in Amherst, but that resonate in the wider American cultural and political landscape today. These include a rising sense of paranoia; evidence of increasingly xenophobic and misogynistic beliefs and behaviors; dysfunctional personal, familial, and sexual relationships; expressions of frustration and rebellion and the dampening of these by figures of authority; and more. For me, what began as a quaint or tongue-in-cheek take on the funny little things that go on in a small town suddenly turned into an unexpectedly meaningful and unsettling reflection on the state of the American psyche today.        

Dickinson was a master of the humble, the quotidian, the domestic. Does your sense of framing and place seek to capture a similar aesthetic?

Photographically, I’m drawn more toward the humble and quotidian, or what in photographic circles is often referred to as “the ordinary and the everyday.” When I was making the photographs for SLANT, I was specifically looking for, and focusing on, that which is commonplace and familiar in that environment—and is familiar to me, too, who spent the first 18 years of life in that environment and identifies with it. But I was also trying to discover and identify small details that threw that ordinariness off-kilter or presented it from a slightly askew or “slant” angle.

For example, throughout the book there are photographs of rather plain-looking clapboard houses that are typical to the region (and would have been familiar to Dickinson and her understanding of the domestic in both literal and symbolic terms), yet in each picture, there’s something strange and oddly unsettling about the house: perhaps it has a crooked window, a slide to nowhere mounted on its roof, or a fallen tree crushing down upon it; perhaps it has a sign on its front lawn that reads Club Castaway – The Best of Exotic Dancers or Enjoy A Drive Thru Marriage Here; or perhaps there’s a Back-To-The-Future-like DeLorean parked in the driveway with its gull-winged doors outspread, and so on. Within the ordinary, something extraordinary occurs, and yet—like the matter-of-fact tone of the police reports—the visual approach, perspective, and aesthetic of the photographs remains straight and deadpan.

Perhaps this is where Dickinson’s sense of humbleness comes into play. Throughout her poetry she doesn’t insist that readers agree with her on fixed meanings or particular truths, but instead invites readers to consider her work on their own terms, and to devise a sense of meaning and truth for themselves. As Dickinson wrote:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors —

SLANT (2019) by Aaron Schuman published by MACK