Winner of the 2013 Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence
Shortlisted for the 2013 Toronto Book Award

The Toronto streetscape: how it looks, lives and changes over time.

Documented in over 400 photographs. For over thirty years, Patrick Cummins has been wandering the streets of Toronto, taking mugshots of its houses, variety stores, garages and ever-changing storefronts. Straightforward shots chronicle the same buildings over the years, or travel the length of a block, facade by facade. Other sections collect vintage Coke signs on variety stores or garage graffiti. Unlike other architecture books, Full Frontal T.O. looks at buildings that typically go unexamined, creating a street-level visual history of Toronto. Full Frontal T.O. features over four hundred gorgeous photos of Toronto’s messy urbanism, with accompanying text by master urban explorer Shawn Micallef (Stroll).

Shawan Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (McClelland & Steward, 2016), Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Coach House, 2010), and The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure (Coach House, 2014). He is a weekly columnistat the Toronto Star and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent,Jane Jacobs Prize–winning magazine Spacing. Shawn teaches at the Universityof Toronto and was a 2011–12 Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College.In 2002, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, heco-founded [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary projectthat spread to over twenty-five cities globally.

Shawn Micallef's profile page

Patrick Cummins has photographed aspects of Toronto’s built environment since 1978. He has worked as an archivist with the City of Toronto since 1986, specializing in photographic, cartographic and architectural records. He has had work featured in several acclaimed photo exhibitions.

Patrick Cummins' profile page