The Registry

This blog is part of the Kodachrome Toronto Registry initiative.  It is loosely related to the Kodachrome Toronto on Flickr pool, which invites Flickr users to add Kodachrome slides to help create a shared composite of the city.

This project’s mandate is to identify and locate all known archives — public and private both — with collections of photos and home movies made using Kodachrome film media. 

With your help, this content — once identified and assembled for a registry — will add to an emerging historical record of the city of Toronto and the GTA in Kodachrome colour.  This registry will be an indispensable reference tool to better understand Toronto’s history, as well as its economics, pop culture, social geography, architecture, infrastructure, ecological legacy, and urban design & planning decisions of the past.

The period being explored covers most of Toronto’s second century, between 15 April 1935 (when Eastman Kodak made Kodachrome movie film available for sale for the first time) and 29 December 2010 (when the last frame of processed Kodachrome film was exposed in Toronto and processed by Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas).

“Kodachrome Toronto: 1935–2010” is being broken into three broad areas, each one a discrete phase:

  1. A masters supervised research project, now underway at McGill University’s School of Urban Planning, to identify and organize known archives, repositories, and collections of Kodachrome media documenting the Greater Toronto Area;
  2. A post-masters project to build an interactive time line of the city with known Kodachrome media, analyzing historical and physical artefacts to compose a visually accurate, illustrated account of Toronto’s evolution as a major city and its emergence as the nation’s premier metropolis;
  3. A photographic history book compiling highlights from this time line.

The broader Kodachrome Toronto: 1935–2010 project is expected to take several years and will undoubtedly draw from the collective wisdom and insight of curators, archivists, historians, and librarians — as well as individuals, families, institutions, and companies.  This project will be largely shaped by the disciplines of geography, urban studies, Canadian history, and information science.