In Amherst, Massachusetts, the week’s misdemeanours arrive in miniature. The local newspaper runs a section headed “Police Reports,” in which crimes, suspicions and non-events are compressed into a few deadpan lines. Aaron Schuman began collecting them. SLANT, published by MACK in 2019, sets a selection of those clippings, printed between 2014 and 2018, beside photographs he made within thirty miles of Amherst in 2016–18.

The pairing takes its logic from slant rhyme, the device Emily Dickinson — who also lived and wrote in Amherst — used to set sounds in close but inexact correspondence, producing variation and a deliberate unharmoniousness. Schuman borrows that principle for the relation between image and text. Nothing quite matches; nothing is meant to. A blandly reported incident and a photograph that seems to belong to another story sit together, and the reader keeps adjusting.

What began as an affectionate, faintly comic portrait of the small towns of Schuman’s childhood hardened as it was made. The 2016 election, and the vocabulary that followed it — fake news, alternative facts, post-truth — changed what the clippings seemed to say. The unease was in the material from the start, but the sequence gives it a direction: the ordinary, the odd and the faintly menacing blur into one register.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in that editing rather than in any single frame. Eighty-eight pages, silk-screen printed hardback, 26 by 22 cm: modest dimensions for an argument about how language and photographs can be made to mislead one another while each remains entirely accurate. It is a compact, precisely built book, and the precision is the point.