artist lecture: peter maccllum

Art and Art History Presents

Peter MacCallum

Thursday 24 September 2009
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.


Sheridan B124

Peter MacCallum on his work: My documentary photography series currently on view at Oakville Galleries surveys the unique memorial landscape created by artists, architects and gardeners at Vimy Ridge in northern France to commemorate Canada’s losses in the First World War. The series centres on the recently completed restoration of Walter Allward’s great limestone monument at the highest point of Vimy Ridge. Prefiguring Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D. C., Allward’s monument combines sculpture and landscape architecture in a powerful and enduring image of loss. Other photos in my documentary series show the preserved battlefield topography of the Vimy Ridge Memorial Park, as well as the sublime landscape architecture of nearby Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, where many Canadian soldiers are buried.

MacCallum is a self-taught, Toronto documentary photographer whose work is primarily concerned with social, architectural and industrial subjects. In his Concrete Industries series of 1998-2004, he examined sites in Southern Ontario related to the production and consumption of concrete and cement. This project is featured in his 2004 monograph, Material World. In 2005, he documented the Lakeview Generating Station, the first of Ontario’s coal-fired power plants to be shut down for environmental reasons. Also in 2005, he began his series at Vimy Ridge in northern France, which he completed in 2008. Since 2006, he has documented the commercial architecture of Toronto’s lower Yonge Street, which will be published in an upcoming monograph.

MacCallum’s photographs have found a home in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Oakville Galleries, Art Gallery of Mississauga, City of Toronto Archives, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, Henry Morgentaler Toronto Clinic, as well as other corporate and private collections. MacCallum is represented by Peak Gallery, Toronto.


Image: Vimy Ridge Monument (2008), gelatin silver print