La Petite Mort Gallery

“Since 2007 I’ve been going to the corner of Cumberland and Murray Streets, in Ottawa, over and over again, obsessed. Obsessed with photographing the feel and the face of the small society of crack addicts that make that corner their home. I work with the cooperation and acceptance of the addicts I’m photographing. They know me, I know them. We have an understanding. The work I’m doing there feels like collaboration.

This ongoing project is called: USER, Portraits of Crack Addicts.

Each year I return to the corner I study a different aspect of it, and its inhabitants. The photographs that comprise USER Men are the latest part of this project. These images, shot in heavy backlight, render the subjects almost as ghosts. The men, posed in expressive postures, show, through their bodies, their skin, their gestures and expressions, another aspect of life on the corner of Cumberland and Murray Streets. Of life as a crack addict. Of what being human can feel like”. – Tony Fouhse, 2010

The view through Tony Fouhse’s lens

By Erin Letson

OTTAWA — When Tony Fouhse makes his annual trip
to the United States to take photos, there’s rarely a dull moment.

There was the time he was at a gas station in Mississippi when a man drove up, got out of his car, lit a cigarette and pumped his gas with the engine running. He had a house-arrest bracelet on. Then there was Fouhse’s first trip to Los Angeles when a cop pointed a gun at him for approaching a crime scene. Or the time a man collapsed and died outside a restaurant window-front while Fouhse was eating breakfast and chatting with a stranger.

“I’ve got a million stories,” says Fouhse, whose preferred mode of travel is a rented convertible. “I like going to small towns and meeting people and then saying, ‘Hey—stand over there and look at the sky,’ or ‘Hold this stick like this.’”
Fouhse is the talent and the brains behind Tony Fouhse Photography, an Ottawa-based business that serves a wide variety of commercial and editorial clients (the magazines Canadian Geographic and Report on Business and the University of Ottawa, to name a few).

But it is also Fouhse’s personal projects—like the ones he goes to the U.S. to work on—that convey his genuine interest in people and their stories. And he’s quick to point out that whether he’s photographing Prime Minister Stephen Harper (for the Globe & Mail) or the cleaning staff at a motel, he’s always honest and treats all his subjects the same—for example, usually uttering the surprise word “motherfucker” at least once a shoot.

Guy Bérubé, director of La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa, says it’s Fouhse’s strong personality that has made him so successful.
“He’s got the sense of humour that some people don’t get,” says Bérubé, who has shown Fouhse’s work several times. “But the fact that it catches people off guard makes him capture the looks he wants when he does portraits.”

One peek at Fouhse’s portrait photographs in his recent promotional booklet titled In Dreamland, and it’s clear what Bérubé is talking about. All the photos appear to be happenstance (“coming in in the middle of something” is how Fouhse describes it), and they capture emotion and vulnerability without looking contrived.
There is Peter Herrndorf, director of the National Arts Centre, looking up with a wash of sunlight around him. A couple of pages later, there’s a drifter from Ohio staring into the camera with eyes that look as if they’ve seen their share of bad times.

Fouhse says he uses conversation as a “point of entry” to get people to work with him. However, he makes clear that his portraits are not random occurrences, despite how natural they may look.

“All the pictures are directed: ‘Stand here. Do this.’ It’s just a matter of isolating the instant,” he says. “It’s a very weird balancing act between control and being totally open.”

His portraits capture emotion and vulnerability without looking contrived.

Fouhse, 52, says it’s his curiosity about people that makes him so passionate about portrait photography. When subjects ask him who’s the most interesting person he’s shot, he always gives a simple answer.
“Whoever I’m shooting is the most interesting because I’m in the moment with them,” he says.

Fouhse has been taking pictures for 30 years, but his enthusiasm and excitement show no signs of waning. He’s a self-proclaimed workaholic who says he hates “dead days” when he isn’t productive.
“All he thinks about is photos,” says Christina Riley, who worked as Fouhse’s assistant for almost two years. “He doesn’t have many other hobbies, so it’s like his number one hobby and it’s his job. I think the fact that he still has passion for taking pictures after all this time stands out against other people who are just doing it for a living.”

Fouhse, who was born and raised in Ottawa, says he didn’t know right away that photography was what he wanted to do with his life. But he recalls being 15 years old and looking through a camera that belonged to his friend’s brother.
“I remember focusing it and moving it around and going, ‘This is cool,’” he says. “Ever since then, I’ve loved photography.” 2006

However, Fouhse didn’t love the photography program he was enrolled in at Algonquin College, and dropped out in 1976. He moved to Toronto, where he worked as a pastry chef until he got “sick of waking up early and smelling like sugar all the time.”
He got a few arts grants, which he used to take photos on the side, and returned to Ottawa in 1986. But it wasn’t until Ottawa Magazine gave him the artistic freedom to go out and shoot religious figures in the community that he fully realized his love for portrait photography.
“Everything sort of snapped and after five years of climbing over a lot of big piles of shit, I finally came out on the other side and sort of saw the plane that I wanted to be in,” he says.

Fouhse worked hard on getting a portfolio together, which led to more opportunities to practise. He says he’s always been a fan of subjective work (“there’s no such thing as objectivity”) and likes his photos to have a certain formality to them.
“I love architecture; I love lines to be straight and I like organized backgrounds,” he says. “But I also like fluid movements in the foreground.”
Bérubé says Fouhse’s photos have a distinct look, one that’s hard to miss, partly due to the looks he captures from people and to his unusual backgrounds. (In Fouhse’s studio photos, the backdrops consist of objects like paint-splattered wood or solid squares of coloured board.)
“He’s the type of photographer where you see his portraits and you know they’re his, as opposed to more studio-style photographers who have the standard backdrop and the perfect lighting,” Bérubé says. “He’s definitely got his thing going on—it’s hard to describe.”

Bérubé recalls asking Fouhse to take portrait shots of his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, soon after the two had met. Bérubé requested two pictures, one where his mother was mentally “present” and one where she was mentally “lost”, to show people how the disease was affecting her.
“He did both photos and it totally told me that his guy knows exactly what’s to be done in these kinds of situations,” says Bérubé.
What struck Riley, the former assistant, about Fouhse was how fast he worked and how excited he was at photo shoots, even for assigned projects.
“I remember him telling me that every job he goes to, he tries to find something that will make the job interesting, even if it’s taking a picture of a cup,” she says. “He’s always trying to make it fun for himself.”
It’s clear that Fouhse’s talent and energy have paid off: he has a big basket of clients and has shown his personal work in galleries around North America, such as the Hamm-Brickman Gallery in Rochester, New York, and the London (Ontario) Regional Art Gallery. His work is also held in the City of Ottawa’s art collection and the National Archives of Canada.

In 2004, Fouhse won a National Magazine Award for photos he took to accompany a story called “Nothing Out of the Ordinary” in Report on Business. He says he “giggled” when he received the trophy but has since hidden it away in his closet. (If he acknowledges people who think he’s good, he explains, he’d also have to acknowledge people who think he’s bad, and he’s not prepared to do that.)
With the amount of success he’s had, Fouhse is the type of photographer who you might expect to work in a bigger, more arts-savvy city.
But while he admits Ottawa is a bit of a “cultural backwater” with “an odour of bureaucracy”, he says he’s happy living here because of the great clients he shoots for and because of his professional freedom, which could be quashed if he were working in a more competitive city.

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web.

“When Tony Fouhse first exhibited his stylized photographs of crack addicts made on a street corner in Ottawa, Canada, he was unsure what the reaction of the opening-night audience would be. But he knew that some of those in attendance would approve: the subjects themselves.

Mr. Fouhse’s photographs put a twist in the ongoing argument about making art out of suffering and making commodities from pictures of misfortune. When his photographs are on view at La Petite Mort, you can see the art inside and the reality outside”.

– New York Times, July 2009