September 2010
La Petite Mort Gallery presents:
TONY FOUHSE: USER MEN
Photography Exhibit
September 3 – 26, 2010
Vernissage Friday Sept 3 / 7 – 10pm
Tunes by Big Mac Daddy
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM
In support of Festival X / Ottawa Photography Festival 2010
Statement: USER Men
“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
Quote from The New York Times: July 22, 2009
Showcase: Crack, Close Up
By JAMES ESTRIN
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.
The corner drug hangout where all of the images were made is within a few feet of Galerie La Petite Mort, where the work was exhibited. Some of the crack users went to the opening. Others would sometimes drop by the gallery, where visitors could glance from the photographs to the corner where the people might be hanging out.
As part of his project, Mr. Fouhse shows his subjects a Polaroid when he takes their picture and gives them a print on his next visit to the corner. He also discusses the photographs with them. They may suggest the pose. And, he said, they approve the image before it’s exhibited. Mr. Fouhse said most of the people who hang out at the corner are supportive of his project.
“I’m not trying to be one of them or tell them what to do,” Mr. Fouhse said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. “I tell them: ‘I’m not trying to make you look good. I’m not trying to make you look bad. I’m just trying to take interesting pictures.’ That’s my only agenda.”
Mr. Fouhse is certainly not trying to sneak photographs of the crack addicts when they are unaware. He uses medium- and large-format cameras, lights and a generator.
Once, the generator was stolen by people whom Mr. Fouhse didn’t know. He figured he would have to kiss $1,000 goodbye. But he gave his phone number to Keith, one of the addicts, just in case. By the time Mr Fouhse returned home, there was a call from Keith saying, “We got your generator back.”
“They wouldn’t take any money,” Mr. Fouhse said. “They found the people and got it back. They could’ve sold it for $150, but they gave it back to me. That’s when I knew I was accepted.”
Mr. Fouhse, 55, was born in Ottawa. He started taking photographs at the age of 19 but didn’t make a living at it until he was 40. Before that, he worked as a pastry chef in restaurants and for the famous Dufflet Pastries. Eventually, he tired of waking up at 5 a.m. and separating 500 eggs every morning and decided to try his hand at commercial photography. His corporate and editorial work support him financially and allow him to work on personal projects.
The addict project started inadvertently when Mr. Fouhse almost died of kidney failure and had to cancel a photographic expedition to Morocco that was supposed to yield an exhibit at Galerie La Petite Mort. When he started to recover, he began looking for a place in Ottawa to indulge his passion for photographing at dusk. After dragging his Hasselblad, light and generator to a few locations, he arrived at the corner of Cumberland and Murray Streets.
In 2007, he took medium-format photos. The next summer, he took pictures of women on the corner, “User Women,” in a more direct style with a large-format camera. This summer, he is photographing on the corner again, now concentrating on the men.
When Kim, a disheveled woman with lice eggs in her matted hair, was shown the photograph Mr. Fouhse took, she was stunned. He recalls her saying: “I look horrible. Normally, I get sort of fixed up before I take a picture.”
He remembers responding: “Kim, you’re a crack addict. That’s what you looked like that day. But look at your eyes. They’re powerful. The picture is about what’s inside you.” After a long discussion, he said, Kim approved the picture (Slide 14).
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.
And you can judge for yourself.” – By JAMES ESTRIN
Statement written by Penny Cousineau-Levine for solo show at IPS Gallery in Montreal, 2009 (USER)
Tony Fouhse’s “User” features photographic portraits and tableaux of a community that is for all intents and purposes invisible in a city known for its Tulip Festival and polite bureaucrats; these unsparing images of down and out drug users belie the carefully crafted, tourist-friendly, photo-op image of our national capital. Taken barely a stone’s throw from Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, they call into question a made-for-tv representation of crack addicts that serves primarily to reinforce the cultural panacea of “just saying no” to drugs.
As a viewer, it can be comforting to think that our voyeurism has been condoned and even invited by individuals within a marginalized group that photography has, if only for a moment, allowed us to penetrate. Equally comforting is the sense that “one of us” is acting as a safe intermediary between ourselves as image consumers, and the “Other.” It is tempting to understand sympathetic portraiture such as that of Fouhse as providing agency to its subjects, returning to them their “humanity,” and thereby countering the inherent imbalance in the photographer-subject relationship.
Rather than settling for these empty antidotes for his viewers’ potential unease, the provocative portraits of Tony Fouhse’s “User” demand that the spectator consider all those to whom the series title might refer. Fouhse understands his images as providing trace evidence of the on-going relationships he has developed with his subjects, but also acknowledges that photography depicting persons with whom the viewer may not want to identify can, and should, evoke uncomfortable questions. “User” addresses head-on the power dynamic inherent in using another’s image for one’s own purpose, be it artistic or documentary.
Thank you,
Guy Berube, director