Downtown photographer turns lens on suburb's sparse beauty

Centretown resident Tony Fouhse is intimately acquainted with Ottawa's downtown.

As a photographer, he's zoomed in on addicts to create a series of portraits for his exhibition User. It was followed by Official Ottawa, shots portraying the city as the seat of federal power. 

"Once I'd done those two things, I thought, I seem to have two ends of the spectrum here," Fouhse told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning. "And then, what's in the middle of the spectrum?"

Suburb is that missing piece of his Ottawa trilogy. Fouhse's subject was Barrhaven — to many, the epitome of ordinary, but to him an alien landscape. His first shoot was also his very first visit.

Fouhse said he doesn't normally take selfies, but he posted several with comments on Instagram as he explored the new environment and wrestled with how to capture its essence. 

"I can't tell if this place irritates me because I can't figure it out, or because it is just plain irritating," he wrote. "Experience tells me that nothing is the result of just one other thing, so it's probably a combo of both those things and more."

On another: "Barrhaven fun fair. No fun."

Getting great shots required a serious effort to get past the clichés rooted in the minds of many, including his own. IMAGE] 

'Because there's people, there's mystery'

"Most people, when they think of the suburbs they think in terms of the cliché of the tract housing, the identical two cars in every driveway, the wiggly streets, " Fouhse said. "When you realize that there's people in that place, you also realize that because there's people there's mystery. So that's the other thing I was sort of looking for."

But Fouhse's photos of people are very different from those in his exhibition User. Most are shot from a distance, which Fouhse said was for reasons both practical and artistic.

"When I saw people, they were always little, across four lanes of highway or main street or whatever you want to call it, so that is just what I was seeing."

 

At the same time Fouhse recognized his own emotional distance from the subject and wanted to demonstrate that.

"I understood the whole addict thing but I didn't really understand the whole suburb thing," he said. "So I thought it would be a little weird for me to go in and pretend to be close, when in actual fact I was quite removed."

 

Nature another theme

Fouhse's photos contrast the newly built homes and box store developments with the forests and wilder scenes they abut, but those natural elements fail to soften Barrhaven's image in his own mind.

"I think the suburbs advertise themselves as being closer to nature, and while there is nature out there and there are pockets of wild woods and stuff, no one ever uses them," he said. "They're like balconies on condos. People think they want them, but they never actually use them. I never saw anyone in the pockets of wild nature."

While some of the people who appear in the photos seem to disappear into a landscape of concrete and construction, in others, they are more dominant as they exert control over their environment. A worker burns weeds that have sprung up at the foot of a tiny garden beneath a street sign, or sprays water from a truck over an expanse of dry lawn.

"I realized fairly quickly that the subjugation of nature was partly what that development, and all development, is about," Fouhse said.

Suburb is on display at Exposure Gallery at 1255 Wellington St. W. until Oct. 3. Visitors can make up their own minds about what to draw from the photos, Fouhse said.

"I learned very early on you can't follow your pictures around and police them. I try to look at things dispassionately, try to learn, but I also have my own biases," he said.

"I don't really want to tell people what to think."