Using the classical sonata form – three movements moving through exposition, development, and recapitulation — as a guide, Schuman invites the reader to explore an Italy as much of the mind as of the world: one soaked in the euphoria and terror, harmony and dissonance of its cultural and historical legacies, and yet constantly new, invigorating, and resonant in its sensorial and psychological suggestions.
This liminal quality can be detected on many conceptual levels, not just in the sense of cultural familiarity [...] Schuman walks the line between euphoria and dread, lust and death, triumph and decline, joy and tedium, tenderness and indifference.
[11] Appropriating this literary device, Slant serves as a wider reflection upon something strange, surreal, dissonant and increasingly sinister stirring beneath the surface of the contemporary American landscape, experience, and psyche.
[12][13] The writer, curator and photographic historian David Campany wrote: "Schuman's project proposes a set of relations without having to formalize or resolve them.
[29] The exhibition highlighted how various aspects of contemporary American culture, which are often presented as diametrically opposed to one another—prosperity and poverty, masculinity and femininity, innocence and violence, fantasy and reality – collide and coexist; how they are in fact intricately linked, integral to one another, and profoundly indivisible.
In 2018, Schuman was invited to be Co-Curator of JaipurPhoto Festival,[30] which featured twelve open-air exhibitions at UNESCO World Heritage Sites throughout the city of Jaipur, India.
The exhibition featured new works alongside work-in-progress, and explored personal history, cultural identity, nationality, community, migration, displacement, responsibility, belief, morality, and memory.
It highlighted the diverse possibilities that photography offers in terms of research, investigation, critique, and self-expression, in the pursuit of both artistic and social progress.