The Simple View of Ottawa

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It’s not that Tony Fouhse doesn’t like Ottawa, the city he has called home for most of his life.

Mr. Fouhse and his wife, Cindy, moved there from Toronto in 1988, having grown tired of the daily pace in Canada’s largest city. In Ottawa, they have an old house downtown. They can hop in the car with their dogs and, after a short drive, find themselves far from city life.

But Mr. Fouhse’s portrait of Ottawa doesn’t fit with how he believes most Canadians, and visitors to Canada, view the country’s capital city, often depicted through the lens of its heritage, natural beauty and politics.

“I’m just trying to bring forward something people walk by all the time and don’t really see,” Mr. Fouhse, 59, said of his series “Official Ottawa.”

Writing about Mr. Fouhse’s work, Ron Corbett, an Ottawa-based journalist, described “the sensation, time and again, of looking at one of his photos and feeling you are looking at â€" to borrow a phrase Hemingway used to describe an honest sentence â€" the true gen.”

The pictures are simple. There are leafy streets. Bland, tired-looking buildings. Empty spaces with an air of anticipation. The series doesn’t attempt to sum up the city. Rather, it’s meant to show it from a different perspective.

“I always say I have no aims and I have no hope,” Mr. Fouhse said. “Mostly I do what I do to entertain myself.”

The project is also a kind of escape for a photographer who spent five years working on heavy projects. He documented crack addicts around Ottawa for a series of stylistic portraits called “User,” which appeared on Lens in 2009. The next fall, he began photographing Stephanie MacDonald, a young woman who was addicted to heroin. The story took an intensely personal turn when Stephanie found out she had a brain tumor. In the spring of 2011, she moved in with the Fouhses while she recovered from brain surgery. Told that she had a 50 percent chance of dying within the first week, Mr. Fouhse would peek into her room every morning, hoping she was still breathing.

“She wanted help getting clean, and I wanted to take pictures of her,” he wrote in an introduction to that work. “But in the end there was no distance.”

After a year spent putting the book “Live Through This” together with Stephanie, who wrote the text, Mr. Fouhse decided to pursue something less draining. Yet he sees a connection between his work on drug addiction and “Official Ottawa.”

“I see it as political,” he said. “I hope it’s kind of political.”

Tony Fouhse Security on Parliament Hill, 2012.

While Mr. Fouhse says there is “an odor of bureaucracy that hangs over the whole city,” his photos of Ottawa aren’t about bureaucracy, but about institutions.

“Most Canadians, when they think of Ottawa, they think of the Peace Tower or skating on the canal, or talking heads standing in front of the Parliament buildings,” said Mr. Fouhse, who is not a supporter of Canada’s Conservative government or its prime minister, Stephen Harper. “I think maybe by trying to keep things plain and simple, what I’m trying to do is strip it down and show the bones of the thing, rather than all the hype and the myth and the fairy tale that people usually project into this city.”

Among his first subjects were Mr. Harper’s bulletproof limousine, the United States embassy and an outdoor photo exhibition he described as “blatantly propaganda.” He has also included some surprising choices, like a portrait of Konstantin V. Zhigalov, the ambassador to Canada from Kazakhstan.

In his work, there is an attempt to be both obvious and obscure â€" as with his portrait of the Israeli embassy. “It’s the simplest shot imaginable,” he said, “but when you say, ‘Israeli Embassy, 50 O’Connor Street, 10th floor,’ it changes everything.”

Mr. Fouhse has been taking photos for about 35 years. He dropped out of high school and briefly went to college, but never graduated. He has worked as a line cook, making pastries, and in factories, building Ping-Pong tables. At one point, with nothing but a Leica and a 21-millimeter lens, he decided he wanted to be an editorial photographer.

While he has trouble describing “Official Ottawa,” Mr. Fouhse said he was trying to “bring forward the official aspects of a capital city that its inhabitants take for granted, or they’ve lost perspective.”

Compared with his previous personal work, the process has been more intellectual than experiential. “Mostly I was just shooting from a list, which is very different for me, because typically I take pictures to have experience,” said Mr. Fouhse, who is still working on the project. “There’s tons I haven’t shot, but I just don’t know what it is yet.”

For now, he plans to photograph the Ottawa police chief, and maybe the mayor. And despite all of the time he has spent photographing the city’s drug world, there is one place he’s still working up the courage to visit.

“I’ve always intended to go to the suburbs,” he said, pausing. “But the suburbs just freak me out.”

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