Live Through This
Tony Fouhse
Straylight Press (Self-Published)
Softbound, with poster and print
86 pages
228 x 228 mm
2013
ISBN 9780969168423
Live Through This by Tony Fouhse tells the story of drug addict Stephanie MacDonald’s struggle to get clean. Typically a topic for documentary photographers pursuing reportage through candid shots, this project instead relies mostly on collaborative portraits, in which Tony Fouhse enlists MacDonald to sometimes mimic the conventions of documentary and anthropological photography. The images of MacDonald, like the world she inhabits, are both banal and extraordinary, conveying psychological, and sometimes physiological, states with an affecting economy of detail. The inclusion of medical documents and text by MacDonald, both written on scraps of paper and from later emails, provides the viewer with a broken and incomplete narrative that nonetheless directs our comprehension of Fouhse’s disturbing but sympathetic photographs.
About the Author
Tony Fouhse is a photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. His work has attracted international attention and been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The British Journal of Photography, American Photography 26, CV Photo, Time magazine and Vie des Arts. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Noorderlicht International Fotofestival in Groningen, The Netherlands (2019); Cortona On The Move photo festival, Italy and, as part of the Beyond Addiction/Reframing Recovery exhibition, in NYC and Rochester, N.Y. (2020).
