SLANT (Election, Fall 2020)

On the day that former US President Barack Obama called “the most important election of our lifetimes”, Foreground launched our online programme How We Live Now with SLANT (Election, Fall 2020) by acclaimed American-born, Somerset-based photographer Aaron Schuman.

SLANT (Election, Fall 2020) was a rework of Schuman’s celebrated series that uses police reports and photographs from Amherst, Massachusetts, to reflect on the disquieting rise of division and intolerance within the climate of post-truth politics in contemporary America.

If you opened the local newspaper in the small New England town of Amherst, 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 SLANT, Schuman interweaves a selection of these clippings with quietly wry photographs he made within a thirty-mile radius of the town, in response to their unintentionally deadpan descriptions. What began as a genuinely affectionate take on the small towns where Schuman spent his childhood steadily came to reflect the disquieting rise of fake news and paranoia in America following the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

SLANT (Election, Fall 2020) was a unique edit of Schuman’s material, created especially for How We Live Now, released as Americans went to the polls in what was anticipated to be the largest voter turn-out in over a century. The huge electoral turn out was pre-figured by the Covid-19 pandemic ravaging the US, while its seriousness was denied by the White House; violent clashes between right-wing militias and civil rights protestors, including politically-motivated killings; attacks on public officials by the president; suggestions of a resistance to a peaceful transition of power; and perhaps the greatest division between Americans on issues of democracy, racial justice, immigration, abortion, gun law and policing since the 1970’s.

In SLANT (Election, Fall 2020), Schuman’s subtly offbeat combination of images and words seen in previous edits of the work were combined to increasingly emphasise the foreboding sense of unease that has grown to dominate the American psyche as something dissonant and increasingly sinister stirs beneath the surface of contemporary American society.

Schuman’s online project was a sombre meditation on what was, at the very least, a complex landmark in the history of American democracy.

SLANT (Election, Fall 2020) can be downloaded from the Publications page.

How We Live Now has been made possible with funding from Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund.