IN THE ‘MIDDLE’ OF OTTAWA
Last piece of a photo trilogy
SUBURB
When: Sept. 8 to Oct. 3 Where: Exposure Gallery, 1255 Wellington St. W. Opening reception: 6-8 p.m., Sept. 8
Ottawa photographer Tony Fouhse ventured to Barrhaven about three dozen times last summer to take subtle, often striking photographs for his latest project, Suburb.
But when he was invited to sit down for an interview this week, he preferred to meet in his usual Centretown stomping ground. Nothing against the southwest suburb of Ottawa, he was quick to note, but it doesn’t hold much attraction for him. Been there, done that.
“I’m a stay-at-home guy,” Fouhse said, swirling his café au lait in a Centretown coffee shop. “If it wasn’t for photography, I’d stay in all the time. I don’t think there’s anything out there that wouldn’t be within walking distance of my house so there’s no real reason to go out there. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy it, but I didn’t fall in love with it.
“I went out to try to understand it, and I gained some kind of superficial understanding through my own filters. Now I think I understand it, and there’s other things I want to understand. I’m a generalist.”
Suburb is the third instalment of an Ottawa-inspired trilogy that began with 2010’s User, a series of intimate portraits of drug addicts, and continued with Official Ottawa, a 2015 project that depicted federal structures, with and without the people who work in them. This time, he went for the middle ground in the power structure of the nation’s capital.
“User was portraits of people who don’t have any real power,” Fouhse explains. “Then because I’m a contrary guy, I thought, ‘What’s the opposite of that?’ and I decided I wanted to look at how the federal presence manifests itself in this city. After I did that, I thought it was interesting that I seemed to have two ends of the spectrum, and I thought, ‘What’s in the middle of that?’ and came up with suburbs, like the middle managers. That’s when I realized it was a trilogy.”
In tackling Suburb, Fouhse strove to transcend the clichéd images of tract housing and SUVdriving soccer moms. He picked Barrhaven because of its defined
geographical area, and was careful to avoid sunsets, rainbows and any other sentimental images. Instead, his landscapes illustrate the delicate balance between development and nature. There are people in some of the photos, but they are generally far off and unidentifiable, up to their own business. Fouhse, who shot on film with a medium-format camera, didn’t spend time getting to know the residents.
“I went in as an alien to observe from the outside,” said the 63-yearold Ottawa native, an award-winning photographer who’s known for his commercial and art photography. “My only understanding comes from just observation rather than interaction.”
The approach was very different than the immersive experience of User, where he befriended addicts and gained their trust.
“I don’t have a cookie-cutter approach,” he says. “I don’t try to make them look all the same because they’re all different subjects. I try to let their juju seep into me, and I try to let it dictate the look and the feel of the photos. Then I can take the photos home and look at them, and see what I’m thinking.”
He describes the photos as data. “It’s a device for me to go out into the field, take notes, then study the notes. The photos are raw data and data’s worth nothing until you extrapolate. What I’m really interested in doing is gathering data, and then, in my studio, I edit and sequence it.
What’s more, he continues, “I use ‘edit’ in the sense that journalists use the word edit. You have a pile of pictures and you try to put them in an order to support the thesis I developed while on the ground, and it’s all filtered through my biases and my memory and all that stuff so it’s not exactly totally subjective, and not totally objective either. I have a bit of both in there.”
Going into the project, one aspect of his thesis was informed by the notion that living in the suburbs brings one closer to nature. Although Fouhse saw patches of forest and untouched bits of wilderness, he didn’t see any recreational activity in them.
“It seemed to me to be like balconies on condos,” he says. “Everyone thinks they want them but no one uses them. I initially went out and just photographed the woods, and what was in the woods. But when I started to put the pictures together, I realized it just didn’t work. There was something wrong with my approach.
“Then I realized that the suburbs are not actually about nature; what they’re about, like all development, is the subjugation of nature. Once I realized that, I could find photos that spoke to that a little. That’s the education process. What I ended up doing, I hope and I think, is I used the clichés for the backdrop and the mystery. Even if it’s just a landscape, I always try to have it as a mysterious landscape. Wherever there are signs of people, there’s mystery. What are they doing? Why are they there?”
His use of available light, whether overcast or cloudy, was deliberate. “I have nothing against photographs with beautiful light. But a lot of times when the photo is done in beautiful light, it becomes about that, and I always like my photos to be more about what I’m pointing the camera at rather than the atmosphere of the beautiful sky. I don’t want to cater to people’s sentimentality. I want to maybe cater to a harder part of their brain.”
Fouhse is not questioning the appeal of the suburbs, nor is he offering a commentary on urban sprawl. He doesn’t even stoop to call it Farhaven.
“I don’t make judgments,” he says. “What I try to be is an impartial observer who has an opinion. Everyone has an opinion. The suburbs are almost always represented as cliché — a long lens, compressed shot of houses along the road that are all the same. I see my job as stepping aside from that: three steps back and look at the horizon. That’s what art is about.”