Anglicana Tales

For his entire career, Peter Coffman, the photographer, has been pretty much separate from Peter Coffman, the architectural historian.

But for Anglicana Tales: Stories of the Nova Scotian Church, Shown and Told, an exhibition running through to July 4 at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, the two managed to work together.

“(The exhibition) is a collaboration between a photographer and a historian, who, in this case, happens to be the same guy,” says Dr. Coffman with a smile.

Organized to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the first Anglican service in Canada, the exhibition documents the built heritage of the Anglican Church through beautiful photography.

The photographs of churches, ranging from the grand to the humble, can be admired on their own merits, but Dr. Coffman is hoping viewers will see them as windows into stories. Taking a page from Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, the 31 photographs in the exhibition are arranged in eight groupings, each grouping telling a story drawn from Dr. Coffman’s research. It’s research that’s spawned not only an exhibition but a few conference papers and journal articles as well.

One grouping, for example, is called The Loyalist’s Tale, a series of photos of some of the earliest Anglican churches in the provinces, built soon after the United Empire Loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia following the American Revolution. The parish churches—white, pretty and fairly simple in design—are echoes of St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square in London, England.

If you go Anglicana Tales: Stories of the Nova Scotian Church, Shown and Told runs to July 4 at Dalhousie Art Gallery, on the lower level of the Dalhousie Arts Centre. The gallery is open Tuesdays to Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and weekends, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Peter Coffman will give a talk at the gallery on Thursday, June 10, 8 p.m.

Another tale, A Tale of Three Churches, speaks of the ideological struggle between high and low factions the Anglican Church was facing in the late 19th century. In Digby in the 1870s, the high faction won out, as symbolized by the arrival of new pastor John Ambrose and the church he had built, a soaring Gothic structure built entirely of wood. Trinity Church in Digby is repeated elsewhere on the Canadian landscape—in Windsor, Nova Scotia and in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland.

But as beautiful and as striking as these churches are, they are disappearing. One of the churches which appears in Anglicana Tales, All Saints Church in Granville Centre, was dismantled and shipped to Louisiana last fall, leaving behind “a cemetery with a bald spot,” says Dr. Coffman. One other has been abandoned; another is about to deconsecrated.

“If we’re going to try and save these buildings, people need to engage with them,” says Dr. Coffman, who is completing a two-year fellowship with the Department of History and has accepted a position at the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“Or else they’re just piles of boards and shingles.”

SEE PHOTOS: Telling tales out of church