A gaunt, emaciated woman looks brokenly out of the photograph. Her eyes never quite meet the camera, as if she’s afraid to make contact with the people she knows will be watching. To the left, there’s a long line of photographs with white backgrounds, most featuring the same young woman. The first photograph of the series shows her crouching on the ground, a needle in her neck. Below, scribbled in handwriting, it says “Stephanie injecting heroin.”
Her name is Stephanie MacDonald, but this isn’t a story of her addiction. This is her incredible story of recovery and resilience, told from the eyes of the man who helped her, photographer Tony Fouhse.
On Jan. 14, Carleton University Art Gallery kicked off their winter show Live Through This, a photography exhibition created by Fouhse and curated by Carleton art history professor Robert Evans.
Gallery director Sandra Dyck said she had wanted to show Fouhse’s work in the gallery for quite some time, but never had the opportunity until now.
“I thought this would be an amazing opportunity to show [Fouhse’s] work,” Dyck said. “They’re very powerful portraits, and I thought it might give people an introduction and a window into a world we might not know that much about, which is heroin addiction.”
“The prints are very close together. The spacing has to do with this idea of a continuous narrative going from the beginning to the end and the idea of creating as little a break as possible between the images,” he said.
Evans said he and Fouhse chose this composition to stress the idea of a narrative.
He adds there’s a very important reason why they chose not to put the photographs in frames.
“We both felt that by putting them in a frame, that actually would make the object more precious,” he said. “When you look at these photographs you realize this project isn’t about making pretty pictures and we wanted to show the grittiness of it.”
Fouhse met MacDonald in 2010, when he was working on his series of portraits entitled Users.
“I had been photographing addicts on a street corner for years,” he said. “And I wasn’t trying to save them, or change them, or judge them, or colonize them, I was collaborating with these addicts to produce a series of portraits.”
But MacDonald was different somehow. On impulse, he asked her if there was any way he could help her. She asked him to help her get clean, and he did.
“I met [MacDonald] and there was something about her that really struck me,” he said. “She was an amazing woman who was brave and honest and sharp and could get in touch with her emotions and wasn’t afraid to show them. I thought wow, what a person. She just happened to be injecting $300 worth of heroin a day.”
Fouhse then started the journey that would become first a blog and then an exhibition.
It’s a startling series, showing Stephanie MacDonald in a truthful, unafraid way. The first time she looks directly at the camera, she has a blinded grimace on her face as she suffers drug sickness after one night without heroin.
The next time she faces the camera, she has survived brain surgery and withdrawal, and is on her way to being clean. The change is shocking — she has gone from 88 pounds to 125 pounds. For the first time, she looks into the camera with a clarity lacking in the earlier photographs. She seems to challenge the viewer, unafraid and confident. A photograph of a note she wrote shows her thanking Fouhse and calling him her family.
“I did it to help her, but I also did it for me. I don’t believe anyone does anything for totally altruistic reasons. I did it because it was exciting, interesting, dynamic. I felt totally alive,” Fouhse said.
And to some extent that seems evident in the photographs.
“This is about experience and the photographs are just souvenirs.”
