AUTHORS AND ARCHITECTURE - PART II: Patrick Cummins

Location

AUTHORS AND ARCHITECTURE

AFH TORONTO’S 2011 LECTURE SERIES

Hosted by the Gardiner Museum

PART II: PATRICK CUMMINS

6 JUNE, 2011

Come join us as we bring in eminent Torontonian thinkers and writers to discuss important issues facing our city.

 Patrick Cummins will guide us through his 30-year journey photo-documenting and studying vernacular architecture in Toronto.

The trip will take us through a range of individual, communal and corporate attempts to articulate, define or differentiate space, by establishing unique, shared or standardized identities. The resulting archive consists of a series of comparative studies that are, in varying degrees, spatial and temporal in nature. 

“The structures I have chosen to photograph, and the way I have chosen to combine them into pieces have served to personalize the city for me, giving definition to it, providing me with a personal sense of continuity through the constant flow of transition and change that inevitably occurs in an urban environment.”

Cummins has worked since 1986 with the City of Toronto's archival program, specializing in photographic, cartographic and architectural records. He has undertaken numerous projects as a photographer exploring the conventions of documentary practice, and has photographed aspects of Toronto's built environment since 1978. He has had work featured in the Heritage Toronto award-winning exhibition Building Blocks: Queen Street West 1847-1890 (2007). He was also curator of four major archival exhibitions, Engineering Toronto: City Maps, 1834-1900 (1993), Your Home, Our City: 100 Years of Public Control Over Private Space (2001), Signs of Urban Life: a History of Visual Communication in Toronto (2004), and A Work in Progress: Preserving Toronto's Architectural Record (2007). His work was recently published in The Hogtown Project by Kristie Macor and Nadine Dolly. 

LECTURE BEGINS AT 7:00PM, THE GARDINER MUSEUM, 111 QUEEN’S PARK CIRCLE, TORONTO

PAY WHAT YOU CAN ($15 SUGGESTED)