Foreground announce release of new File Note essay on Aaron Schuman’s SLANT

We are delighted to announce Facts and Other Mysteries, a newly commissioned text by David Campany on Aaron Schuman’s series SLANT as part of the Document and Location programme.

Facts and Other Mysteries is the third essay released in Foreground’s File Notes series, an occasional series of commissioned writing that will critically engage with different areas of Foreground’s programme.

The new essay explores SLANT, a project by Document and Location member Aaron Schuman that interweaves clippings of police reports published between 2014-2018 in the local paper in Amherst, Massachusetts, with quietly wry photographs made by Schuman within a thirty-mile radius of the town, in response to their unintentionally deadpan descriptions. What began as a genuinely affectionate, tongue-in-cheek take on the small towns where Schuman 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.

Written by acclaimed photography critic David Campany, Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography, New York, Facts and Other Mysteries sees Campany set out a series of discrete fragments that weave their way through reflections on the historical exploration of image to text relationships, the impact of photographic technology on writing, and the challenging partiality of truth. Campany posits that endeavours to marry image to text all stem from their own motivations and desires, in turn contributing to the ‘slanting’ nature of how we view world affairs more broadly.

“There is only slant. Regimes of realism are just that. Regimes. Shared or enforced conventions that eventually crumble. When they do crumble, there can be immense feelings of relief, but also of trepidation and anxiety: will the world be plunged into relativism? Into ‘post- truth’? Into ‘fake news’? (The death of God had, and is having, a similar effect). But ‘slant’, as I imagine Dickinson and Schuman to understand the term, is not the same as ‘spin’. Slant is a matter of accepting that truth must be pursued while knowing that its form cannot be presumed. It has to be fought for, and fought over, speculated, experimented, hypothesized, wrestled with, and offered sincerely, while knowing that it is always going to be partial and provisional.”

Facts and Other Mysteries can be read and downloaded for free via the Publications page on the Foreground website or the Writing page on the Document and Location website. Find out more about Aaron Schuman here.