Elgin Park from Animal on Vimeo.
Welcome to Michael Paul Smith’s Elgin Park: A 1/24th-scale recreation of everyday scenes from mid-20th century America, ranging from the 1920s to the mid-1960s.
Elgin Park is a lot of things: a 1950’s utopia, a fantastical world, and an optical illusion.
Artist Michael Paul Smith’s imaginative town– composed entirely of miniatures– delighted audiences worldwide when his photo series became wildly popular.
The series posted on Flickr went viral, attracting 76 million visitors from around the world. Michael’s work has since been featured by media around the world.
For the first time, the documentary Elgin Park dives into the life of this charming, reclusive artist to reveal the dark inspiration behind his work. What started as an exercise in model-making and photography became a dreamlike reconstruction of the town Michael grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood and feel of his memories.
Michael serves up a comforting slice of mid-20th-century Americana: the local banker’s slinky ’56 Lincoln Premiere reflects the summer sun outside the hardware store on Main Street. A spit-shined Divco truck delivers fresh milk from the Borden dairy. On the town’s outskirts, where rents are low and hot-rodders use the county road as a dragstrip, a custom ’55 Ford gets a set of loud pipes at a one-bay speed shop.
Driving Michael’s creation of Elgin Park were his memories of Sewickley, Pa., a real steel-mill town a few miles north of Pittsburgh. He spent his first 17 years there, and it still holds his heart.
“Elgin Park is not an exact re-creation of Sewickley,” he explained, “but it does capture the mood of my memories.”
The buildings are constructed of resin-coated paper, styrene plastic, and wood, plus numerous found objects. Photographing
the scenes with real life trees and woods in the background, Elgin
Park takes on a very real appearance.
The vehicles are from Michael’s collection of 300+ commercially produced, diecast models. Although drawn to American cars of the ’30s to the ’60s, Michael does not call himself a car buff. “As a teenager, I was a car enthusiast for the design, not so much the horsepower,” he said.
Describing himself as a recluse, Michael has created his own little world he’d like to live in. Like photographs pulled from shoeboxes in dusty attics, the images he makes form a parade of memories that, one by one, reveal the focal points and quiet corners of an imagination and a small town called Elgin Park.
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The Elgin Park book is available for preorders at animalmediagroup.com/shop/elgin-park/. All preorders will be shipped to arrive by June 21st and each will be signed by the creator of Elgin Park, Michael Paul Smith.
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by Skippy Massey
This post originally appeared at the Humboldt Sentinel. Reprinted with permission.
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