Here's David:
I’ve been following Tony Fouhse’s photographic output for the past several years, and let me say this at the outset: he’s the real deal.
For those who haven’t been keeping up, Tony is a professional photographer with an impressive cv of publications, official portraits & such under his belt. You have but to flip through his website to know what we’re dealing with. A few years ago (iirc), Tony retired from professional assignments and commissions, and turned to artistic pursuits, leveraging this rich experience to craft deeply personal statements. Tony unleashed, you might say.
I’m interested in Tony’s work, because I recognize in it a dark vein of visual ideas that are, at least superficially, similar to ones I’m drawn to (Tony strikes me as a more rounded individual who, I’m pretty sure, would rather we not dwell on this characterization). His expression is nuanced, ambiguous, and broadly recognizable. This last bit is crucial in distinguishing his take from those who cosplay gratuitously morbid themes for gravitas.
His latest cycle of personal work consists of an email newsletter “Hypo,” chronicling his at times choppy progress, “the middle of nowhere” (the book), and an installation at a show in his hometown of Ottawa. He calls this cycle “Current,” publishing numbered “Fragments” at irregular intervals.
I confess that successive newsletters made me feel skeptical about the outcome. The whole thing is really experimental. The images posted in newsletter ‘Fragments’ (samples of work in progress) are sketchy. Sketchy, it transpires, is the point. This wasn’t self-evident, and I didn’t know what to make of it — a sound strategy to build and sustain interest in the project, if intentional.
“the middle of nowhere”
Last May, Tony showed me a preview copy of the book. Else based on the newsletters, I probably wouldn’t have bought it, or ever seen it. I’m one of those dumb bastards who thinks if I’ve seen it online, I’ve seen it. Thing is, I’m a tactile person. I grew up on crafts during that era (1970s). Pottery, weaving, the whole nine yards. And I fell in love with Tony’s book after handling it for a few minutes. I have one of Tony’s previous books, “Endless Plain,” which I reviewed here. That one was commercially printed, and the physical object is itself a bit meh. This is different.
Tony printed, trimmed, bound, and published this book himself. No middle people, no machine-minders. His choice of humble materials is interesting: plain brown cardboard cover, and some thin, uncoated inkjet paper, printed on two sides in monochrome black. The process imparts a slightly strange but pleasant, velvety texture and weight to the pages. The volume is small, yet it feels substantial.
The images were all shot close to home, according to one of the newsletters. I mentioned the whole project is experimental, unlike anything Tony has previously done (afaik). He ain’t repeating himself. His previous monochrome book, “While I Slept,” was also experimental, in that he used an autonomous, low-resolution ‘game’ camera to capture images at random intervals *while he slept*, that he then selected, did stuff in post (I guess), and had commercially printed.
“the middle of nowhere” builds on that. For this round, Tony shot the source images in more or less conventional fashion with a hand-held digital camera, dispensing with two of my theoretical objections to “While I Slept” — they aren’t random, ‘found’ source images, and the photographic quality is way better.
While drawing up an outline for this review, I wrote down a string of adjectives from my first take of the book. Ghostly. Death & decay. Emaciated. Troubled. Scars. Exhausted.
Pretty grim, right?
Inkjet printing uses dithering rather than half-toning for tonal/colour reproduction. Although it is easily capable of sharp, continuous tone prints, Tony’s process imparts a subtle grainy softness in which photographic detail is subsumed, but not entirely lost. A great deal is implied. This is the ‘secret sauce’ that unifies what might be considered a night owl’s portrait of a (fictional) shabby, mixed-zoning neighborhood.
A quiet, somber minimalism is at work. An image that stands out for me is an empy sardine can with lid peeled back, on a surface covered by cuts and scratches with “from heaven” and “blood” written on it. The subject has no intrinsic interest, nevertheless the composition gives it an edge. There is much visual variety in this short, 26-page book. The roles and motivation of its denizens are difficult to infer from their gestures, expressions, and situations. A glassy-eyed dog bares an enormous fang. A newborn baby stares out apprehensively. A morbidly thin person pulls up their pants. An old woman floats face up in a bathtub, eyes closed.
Perhaps they are all ‘nowhere.’ Or perhaps they are Tony Fouhse’s private somewhere, his familiars, tenuously connected to the outside world by wires strung across the sky, lying about broken in tangled masses. The book is at once troubling, and consoling.
Disclaimer: These are my own musings and characterizations of “the middle of nowhere,” and I claim no special insight into Tony’s intentions for the project. See it for yourself.