The Middle Years: 1985–2000
Back in Canada, still broke, and loaded with youthful naiveté, I get a wakeup call and begin to figure out how to turn photos into money.
This is the second installation of my photo-life in 5 parts.
Read part 1: My First Ten Years In Photography, Part 3: Things Work Out and Things Fall Apart and Part 4: USER.
Now where was I? Ah, yes, during the first ten years, Cindy and I had gone to Europe, spent all our money and washed up back in Canada.
BACK WHERE WE STARTED, 1985
Broke, with no prospects. We decided to go to Ottawa, where we had family. We moved into a spare room at Cindy’s parents place and almost immediately I got a job in a commercial darkroom and Cindy picked up work where she could. We scraped together enough money to move into a place of our own, a small flat on Gladstone Avenue. We were 30-years-old, it felt like we were starting over. I suppose we were.
We had left Toronto, where I made my living working on production lines in factories and now here I was, in Ottawa, doing essentially the same thing. This time, though, instead of making baby carriages and ping pong tables I was printing (mostly) boring photographs for professional photographers.
Once again, I was a slave to the grind. It would be more than a year before I picked up my camera again.
MECHANICSVILLE, 1987-89
I had spent most of my years in Toronto photographing my life, but now, in Ottawa, that subject seemed spent, devoid. And, besides, I was looking for something new — a new approach, a new challenge. Then I stumbled upon a small working class neighbourhood in Ottawa called Mechanicsville.
Mechanicsville was a pretty much self-contained community. You could feel that it was a throw-back of some kind, it was a neighbourhood that you just knew was destined to be changed by progress, by time, by gentrification.
So I set about hanging out, getting to know the people who lived there, gaining access and, I thought, some insight. This was a new way of working for me, spending the time, embedding myself, going the same place over and over, rather than grabbing images, like I used to do, as I walked by.
When I finished the project the work was exhibited at Gallery 101 in Ottawa. A lot of folks from Mechanicsville came to the opening and, let me tell you, they were not pleased. There were tears and recriminations. They though I had misrepresented their lives and their neighbourhood. Perhaps (probably) I did.
I was rocked, their reaction made me think long and hard about my point of view, about my opinions, and about how photography is not a neutral medium. About this time I also got fired from my job, it would seem that I was no longer able to fit into the shapes and forms that society required. It was time for a rethink.
NEW PATH 1990–95
What I ended up doing was, I sold my Leicas and bought a Hasselblad, not that merely buying a new tool will change your mind, or anything. But I thought I might try to make my living as a photographer and, despite my proclivity to shoot street-style I knew I didn’t want to be a photojournalist. I decided to become an editorial photographer and medium format seemed like the way to go.
“I sold my Leicas and bought a Hasselblad, not that merely buying a new tool will change your mind, or anything…”
In the meantime there was the home life, Cindy as a constant. Truth be told, though, my memories from this time are a bit thin. Could be the drugs I started taking again (after being clean for 10 years), or it might be the fact that we were both past the blush and rush of our youth, might be the natural result of just plain settling in, settling down. Probably a combination of all that, plus other stuff I can’t contemplate.
Anyway . . . I was still left with the fallout from what I had done in Mechanicsville. I began looking for a way to represent the outside world (and, I suppose, my relationship to it) in a way that wouldn’t terribly misrepresent that which I photographed. I figured if I photographed people who went out of their way to express their interests and allegiances, well, how can that be misrepresentation? (I know, I know . . . every photograph is a misrepresentation, a recontextualization, an opinion; sometimes benign, occasionally toxic, or more likely somewhere in the continuum between those two poles.)
“I began looking for a way to represent the outside world in a way that wouldn’t terribly misrepresent that which I photographed.”
So, I went to protests.
In every direction at these demonstrations were peoples’ overt attempts to show what they stood for. The signs the protesters held reminded me of speech bubbles in cartoons.
I soon realized that there were other ways and means the folks use to express their allegiances so I sought those, too.
MAKING A LIVING
There was also the problem of making a living. I was at the point where I had to figure out how to turn my obviously limited repertoire of photo-skills into money. And, by the way, I didn’t understand money. I had the notion it was bad, and I certainly didn’t know how to use it. I had no commercial skills, but I was stubborn and full of desire to make money with my camera.
The idea of assisting never crossed my mind (stupid), neither did shooting lowest-common-denominator type images. So I cobbled together a portfolio that showed what I was about and made the rounds of all the usual (local) folks who might pay for photography. And barely eked out a living.
I quickly realized I’d need to learn how to actually shoot editorial portraits, you know . . . the type that was in demand (but also authentic to, or somehow represented, my point of view). So I bought a couple of lights and started to figure it out. And so began a very steep learning curve. The good thing, for these early commercial years, was that Cindy and I were used to being broke so struggling to get by was the one thing we were really good at. And that certainly helps when you set out, like I did, with no real idea of how the whole thing works.
Most of my work was editorial, but I also did some commercial work: annual reports, advertising, collateral and so on. Plus, once in a while, a private commission.
And so I plugged away. At first my sights were set low: a roof over my head, food on the table and a tiny bit to put away seemed, to me, like success. I was learning on the job, slowly I got better at it, my client list expanded, my ambitions increased. I was making a half-decent living.
During this time I was putting all my energy into the editorial/commercial stuff, the idea of growing my business excited me. The magazine work allowed me to get my creative ya-ya’s out and, apart from a few small things, I didn’t shoot another personal project until the turn of the century.
And, speaking of the year 2000, that was when I got my ass kicked by a respected photo editor, the dot com boom began and things really took off.
That’s part three . . .
Tony Fouhse is a photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Check out is his archived years of blog posts.
Fouhse is also a publisher of photobooks at Straylight Press, which you can follow on Facebook and Twitter.
