Wednesday, 22 February 2012 13:25

Patrick Cummins is a Toronto based artist who has taken the last 30 years to document Toronto’s changing streetscape in a unique way never seen on this type of stage before. His interests lay not the new rising monuments or widely popular scenic areas of Toronto; instead, Cummins’ photography offers an escape into the side of Toronto that is easily lost in the bustle of the city. He opens up the city to illuminate the easily overlooked, and then ushers us in to share in his find.

The extensiveness of the ongoing project Cummins has initiated is unrivalled. The first ten years of his documentary project, beginning in 1978, was nothing more than the ambitious undertaking of accumulating photographic evidence of Toronto’s common, everyday architecture in various places of the city. The plan was just to take photos and build a collection, one building at a time. Ten years later, Cummins catalogued his collections in 1988, and a realization was made. Cummins discovered that unbeknownst to himself and without purpose, he had taken shots of the same buildings more than once. As he began to line up his images labelled under the same address, he found that he was literally watching the changes that occur during the passage of time right before his eyes.

Without his conscious awareness, Cummins’ architectural documentation had taken on the character of narrating a cultural phenomenon. After becoming aware of his pleasant mistake, Cummins decided to take the project in a deliberate direction. Thus, since 1988 till present day, Cummins has created a collection of retraced steps, the re-discovery of seemingly unimportant buildings and how they have developed under the radar of realization. His collection now tells the engaging tale of Toronto’s perpetual transfiguration, and how easily missed it all can be.

Mr. Cummins has gone about his work with an attractive modesty that matches his topics, shooting with a simple 35-millimetre camera he bought in the 1970s. There are no special camera angles or forced perspectives; the photos are taken head on and most are just in black and white. The way the photos are produced and presented are just as low key as the buildings themselves, and yet somehow the project speaks in such a grandeur that they cannot be ignored.

Liberty Village is still that community space under development. Changes can be seen on a daily basis, without having to wait three decades, like those that span the project of Patrick Cummins. It is still surprising to see the images of a city under construction, and the area of Liberty Village is just as prime a candidate now, as it was thirty years ago.

More of Patrick Cummins photography and his work with documenting the re-writing of the city, entitled “Collations” can be seen at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32175940@N06/

Emily Karpazis