Photobook review: After the Fact, by Tony Fouhse

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

~ Bertolt Brecht

Dummy with possible cover (©Tony Fouhse)

That its very title is itself redacted should tell you all you need to know about After the Fact, the new photobook by Ottawa photographer Tony Fouhse.

To take in this sequence of 46 photos is to give yourself over to the forces of surveillance, the feelings of anxiety, and the potential for cruelty that permeate our current social malaise.

Your response to the work will depend in large part on where you come down on the tradeoffs we must make as a society between personal freedom and public security.

And, to how these tradeoffs make us feel, once made and made visible.

For example: do you feel reassured by military helicopters hovering over your head at night, or do you feel threatened? Did the man with the battered face get this way from crowd-control forces run amok, or did he start a fistfight? Who is that lying on the morgue table, and how did they get there? Whose blood is on those sheets?

In these often grainy digital images, Fouhse provides no answers.

Untitled (fog). ©Tony Fouhse

The  flat lighting and imperious architecture in After the Fact may evoke echoes of his previous work, Official Ottawa. But the scope here is much broader, and deliberately so.

While Official Ottawa specifically presented Canada’s capital city as the seat of federal power, After the Fact widens its viewpoint to powers we can neither see nor elect.

Nor, in some cases, hold accountable.

In the former, buildings and individuals are specifically identified. After the Fact, however, is deliberately a work of fiction. The real people, places, and incidents portrayed are used fictitiously, as Fouhse writes on the last page.

Initially titled The Future, the project took Fouhse two years to shoot and a further four months to edit and sequence. Featuring a color palette dominated by greys and blues, the book “combines portraits, tableaux and landscapes into an open-ended narrative arc, one that evokes the feelings of anxiety that lurk behind the facade of the everyday.”

Untitled (night sky). ©Tony Fouhse

Countering Fouhse’s convincing visual narrative is the statistical proof that over the past 25 years, the quality of life on this planet has actually been improving. World hunger has declined by 40 percent; child mortality by 50 percent, extreme poverty by 75 percent.

But Fouhse is interested not in facts but in feelings. “After the Fact points to the regression that’s in the air, to our increasing uncertainty and fear and to the changing political and physical climates that we find ourselves in these days,” he writes.

Untitled (ice road). ©Tony Fouhse

“Through certain repetitions and echos, the work hints at the cyclical nature of time and history,” he continues. In these repetitions, birds hover ominously against a sickly grey sky. Lonely apartment buildings stand against dirty, grey snow. Isolated individuals, their faces marked by unease, look anxiously outside the frame.

We don’t see what they’re looking at. Nor will we ever. But we must persist. And sing, if only, as Brecht tells us, about the dark times. And that is, I think, the whole point.

This is a challenging and difficult work. And Tony’s best so far.

Tony’s next project, already under way, is entitled November.

Disclosure: I was a financial and social supporter of Tony’s Kickstarter campaign for this project.

All photos ©Tony Fouhse.