I stopped in this evening at Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities, to check out the Shepherds of Good Hope's 25th anniversary open house. (The Shepherds got their start, back in 1983, in the basement of this 117-year-old Lowertown church.)
I'd seen the announcement on artengine's mailing list that the event would include an exhibit of photos from Tony Fouhse's series USER, (which was shown at La Petite Mort Gallery last November) and poetry by Crazzy Dave, the "Homeless Poet" - who you may have seen in his spot on the George Street side of the downtown Chapters outlet, with his poems written on found cardboard. So I went down to check it out.
The photos were on display up by the wine and cheese in the sanctuary. I was handed a ticket for a glass of wine at the door and invited in. There was a display of local schools that help the Shepherds, posters of their volunteers lined up along the aisle, and a a sculpture/installation on one wall - the Shepherds of Good Hope logo done in soup cans (I hope pictures will be available: I talked to the volunteer who had built it, who said that some had been taken.)
And I got my glass of wine and went to look at the pictures. Fouhse's shots are dark, blue-washed, and artificially posed, but lovely to look at. Characters (because that's what they looked like) were evocatively framed and constructed - a couple with obscured faces sharing a joint, a man with long hair and his face half hidden by steepled hands, an old man with a white beard and thin arms standing shirtless on the pavement. They were really quite gorgeous, if oddly static. And then, as I was getting to the last of the shots, a man asked me, "What do you think of them?"
"They're cool," I said, and he said, "I think they're awful. And I'll tell you why."
All of the pictures were taken at the corner of Murray and Cumberland, around the corner from Saint Brigid's near Centre 454, a homelessness service centre. This man (I found out later his name was Steve) said, "These people are my people. They're my community. And this is not how they look." He was carrying a camera, and brought out a picture he'd taken of one of the subjects in one of Fouhse's photos - a balletic image of a woman apparently lifting another to her feet. The woman being lifted had short spiky hair, and looked lost, confused, or maybe tragic. "She doesn't look like that," Steve told me. "That despair. He had to work with her for a really long time to get that picture." And he showed me the picture he'd taken - a bubbly-looking, sunlit blonde, grinning in close-up and washed in gold.
"That guy - he's got all kinds of talent," Steve said. "They're really good photos. But they're not pictures of those people. It's the eyes. Those eyes are all wrong. If they were that full of despair, they'd whack themselves." He told me about some of the people in the pictures, about their lives, a little about his own. "There's always hope, though," he said. "There's hope, and he's not showing that."
From Fouhse's own statement, available near the pictures, I get this:
"I'd make mental notes on the vibe and situations I encountered on the corner. Then I'd set up situations that reflected these. I worked to manifest the look and feel I had in mind for these images. I believe that you can approach a truth by creating a fiction. User ... I don't believe in Objectivity. So here I present pictures that reflect my idea of what goes on on the corner of Murray and Cumberland Streets. My idea of photography. My idea of drug addicts and the people that associate with them. They use. I use."
From one of Crazzy Dave's poems, displayed on cardboard scattered around a cot bed, bag, small dresser and bowl set up at the back of the church:
"Why do you look at me like I'm a creature in a zoo?"
Hm.
