Centretown photographer unravels mysteries of Ottawa suburbs

By Irene Galea

To Centretown-based photographer Tony Fouhse, the suburbs were a cliché he didn’t understand. So, in order to unravel their mysteries, he decided to photograph them.

After 35 trips to the Ottawa outskirts of Barrhaven, Fouhse returned with a new perception and a new photo series, aptly titled “Suburb.”

This project completes a trilogy that Fouhse has been working on since 2010. His first project, “User”, featured drug addicts in the city centre. The second instalment, “Official Ottawa”, captured the opposite end of the power structure: the federal presence in our capital. To Fouhse, the suburbs represent a median between these two things — a “middle manager,” as he describes it.

The exhibition opened Sept. 8 and runs until Oct. 3. at the Expanse Gallery at 1255 Wellington St. W., located  on the second floor studio above Thyme and Again Food Shop.

During a recent interview, Fouhse seemed right at home with his large latte at a Centretown coffee shop, where he said that although he has no bias against people who live in the suburbs, he could never do it himself.

The 63-year-old photographer has always been drawn to the centre of urban scenes. Apart from 10 years spent living in downtown Toronto, Fouhse has been a Centretown resident all his life.

This may be why, of the three settings for his trilogy of shoots, the photographer said that Barrhaven was the strangest.

“After I spent some time in the suburbs, I realized that that was the most alien to me,” he noted. “I understand drug addiction, I understand how the federal presence manifests itself. But this — I didn’t really understand.”

According to Fouhse, this mystery itself was one of the foundations of the project. He first realized this while taking a picture of a family from a distance when they stopped to look at something on the ground – a shot that he eventually titled Sunday Walk.

“When I looked at that picture, I realized, why did they stop? What are they doing? It occurred to me that it was a mystery. Then I thought, ‘Ohh!’ Whenever there’s people, there’s mystery. I then started to use the cliché as a backdrop, and I tried to put the mystery in the foreground.”

Sheila Whyte, president and owner of Thyme and Again, said that the gallery has been getting lots of good feedback and traffic. Her café-gallery mashup features a different, and usually local, artist every month. This is good news for Ottawa artists, who may hope to have their work featured publicly.

“The concept is that there isn’t a photography gallery in Ottawa anymore, so we promote local talent,” said Whyte.

This art is appreciated by patrons such as Marie-Pierre Chaumont, a current Westboro resident, who has lived in the suburbs and identifies with Fouhse’s photos.

“Suburban areas are a kind of twilight zone for me,” she explained, gazing at the photos while waiting for her tea to steep. Although she lived in Manoir Des Trembles, a Gatineau suburb, she says that she gets a similar feeling from Fouhse’s take of Barrhaven’s cookie-cutter architecture.

Fouhse isn’t trying to elicit one single response with his images; instead, he hopes the people who see them will come up with their own opinions.

“Some people will look at it and see cliché. Some people will look at it and say, ‘bullshit,’” he said.  “Some may look at it and think, ‘Oh, I never thought of it like that before.’”