'If we can have the first slide and the lights off’

'If we can have the first slide and the lights off’

Catalina Mejía Moreno

Lecture Hall, 6.30pm

In the shape of a 35mm colour slide show this talk will reproduce some of Reyner Banham’s and Robin Evan’s slide collection archived at the AA Photo-library, projecting their still unknown photographic transparencies. The talk analyses the distinct use of the slides by these two aforementioned architectural historians. In doing so it reflects on the particularities of this architectural medium and exposes the tension between the double nature of the slide as public – performed for a collective audience – and private – as used for personal means of documentation.

This talk is part of the Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Project Architecture in/as Photography at the CCA in Montreal.

Speaker Bio:

Catalina Mejía Moreno is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Humanities at the University of Brighton and Adjunct Faculty member at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. She is currently PhD candidate in Architectural Theory and Criticism at Newcastle University and Mellon Researcher at the CCA in Montreal.

The lecture will be followed by the exhibition opening of Reyner Banham Photographs

Reyner Banham: America

Photo Library Corridor Gallery

37 Bedford Square, 7.30pm

British architectural historian Peter Reyner Banham was not only a vivid writer but also a compulsive snapshot photographer who described himself as an ‘observational historian.’ Banham repeatedly visited and recorded buildings, cities and landscapes with one of his many cameras and several Ecktachrome and Kodachrome films. This exhibition gives an insight into his America to which he moved in 1976 to join the University of New York in Buffalo. Industrial landscapes, car lots, ordinary houses, a view of the road; these photographs are only a selection of his hundreds of 35mm colour slides housed at the AA Photo Library that reveal his distinct photographic body of work.