Pubdate: Wed, 06 Feb 2013
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2013 The Ottawa Citizen
Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Peter Simpson
Page: C7

THE NEEDLE, THE DAMAGE, UNDONE

Photographer Tony Fouhse Helps Bring Addicts Back From the Brink

Photographer captures the road back from drug addiction The phrase 
"Live Through This" sounds like a dare, with an implied but real 
chance that you will not live through whatever "this" is.

At one point during Tony Fouhse's two-year project, titled Live 
Through This, the odds were 1 in 2 that Stephanie MacDonald, the 
subject of his photographs, would die. The odds were surely higher 
when MacDonald, then a 22-year-old junkie in Ottawa, checked herself 
out of hospital too soon after brain surgery, against medical advice, 
and slipped away into the night to score whatever would get her high.

She lived through it, just as she lived through the heroin and other 
drugs, through the prostitution that paid for it all, and through a 
filthy life on the streets of a city that wasn't even her own.

In early 2010 MacDonald fled to Ottawa, already an addict, from 
arrest warrants back home in Nova Scotia. She hit the streets in the 
Market and trolled for drugs, turning tricks as necessary.

I met her one afternoon in 2010, with Fouhse on Murray Street as he 
took portraits of junkies for User, the project that led to Live Through This.

MacDonald was dressed in shorts and a grimy Tshirt. She hadn't been 
on the streets for long, and she looked less ravaged by drugs than 
did the other junkies, beaten but not yet defeated. Perhaps that's 
why Fouhse decided to help her, among all the degraded men and women 
he shot for User.

"June 15, 2010," MacDonald says without hesitation, and fondly, when 
I ask when she met Fouhse. She moved back to New Glasgow, N.S. last 
year, but returned to Ottawa this week to see the exhibition at 
Carleton and take part in the launch of the book, also titled Live 
Through This.

We walk past the photographs of her and the detritus of her life - 
the medical reports, the drug paraphernalia. Again, there's no 
hesitation when I ask, where would you be now if you hadn't met 
Fouhse? "I would have been dead, for sure."

Fouhse's User was a project of moral ambiguities. He took portraits 
of drug addicts on the street, and paid them $5 to pose.

Some viewers saw art or documentary, some saw exploitation. I saw a 
simple concept executed brilliantly, a fine example of art stoking 
debate and discomfort by forcing people to look at a brutal, real 
part of their tidy city.

Fouhse's goal was not to help the addicts, per se, but he did help 
MacDonald. I ask her, why you?

She says he saw that "my eyes told a story, they were really strong." 
I ask Fouhse, why her? "There's something honest about her, and 
brave. She's able to get in touch with her emotions and she's 
fearless in terms of showing them to people.

She holds nothing back during our interview.

"Sometimes I have rough days, like maybe once a month I'll use a 
pill, but other than that I'm two years (clean)," she says, as she 
walks slowly along the row of two dozen or so frameless images, 
plainly pinned to the gallery wall.

"I think to myself that I'm always going to be a junkie, but at the 
same time I'm not. I have to get that out of my head."

She looks at one particularly uncomplimentary portrait, the low point 
of her odyssey. "I'm embarrassed by most of these pictures, but 
that's how I was, every day."

I tell her that it takes admirable strength to do something that 
embarrasses herself. She doesn't respond, and I wonder if she's 
unfocused, but it seems like she's simply absorbed in looking at the 
photographs of herself. "This is the very first photo of me," she 
says, pointing at a portrait. "It was the day my boyfriend got out of jail."

Fouhse says, "A lot of stuff happened when Stephanie and I were 
together that I didn't photograph at all, because I had the choice, 
am I a photographer or am I her friend? There was a lot of drama."

It's difficult to imagine what was held back. One arresting portrait 
shows MacDonald holding up her long hair as she injects heroin into 
her neck, between the scabs and sores. Other photos show her sick, 
scared and scarred.

A huge, fresh scar runs up the back of her neck, from the surgery to 
treat a brain cyst in 2011.

Fouhse says the doctors advised MacDonald that she had a 50 per cent 
chance of dying in the week after her surgery, yet three days after 
the operation she checked herself out of the hospital. Her mother had 
come from Nova Scotia, and they all stayed at Fouhse's house. "They 
hadn't seen each other in four years," he says, "Steph's mom hardly 
recognized her."

During the night MacDonald snuck out and vanished.

"I know where we can find her," Fouhse said in the morning. In the 
Market, getting high.

MacDonald lived through it. She returned to New Glasgow, a 
nondescript, industrial town in northern Nova Scotia, and she 
continues to see-saw. "She's on methadone," Fouhse says. "She's doing 
well but she falls sometimes." Two portraits show the contrast. In 
each she stands on a mattress and stares into the camera. In the 
first, from April, 2011, she looks wasted, sickly.

In the next, three months later, she looks comparatively strong and 
confident. Part of the change is due to Fouhse's composition - in the 
April portrait her clothes and the background are bland greys and 
whites, while in the June portrait she's amid brightly checked and 
bold colours that accentuate her growing strength - but her progress is clear.

MacDonald is still living through it, but the June photograph shows 
her re-emergence as a personality, as more than a reviled caricature. 
She looks like a vulnerable but normal young woman, the person I once 
saw on the street in 2010, trapped inside a junkie.
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