I discovered the small (very small) town of “Elgin Park” the same way millions of others around the world have: someone forwarded me a link to a Flickr slide show. The subject line was “Cars of the past … real or models?”
The photos were of models, all right, but they appeared so much more lifelike than any dioramas I’d seen before. I felt as if I was looking at a movie that was expressed in stills.
I would soon learn that my view of Michael Paul Smith’s photos of this imaginary town was one of about 20 million — so far.
I wrote about Mr. Smith and his scaled-down town for the Sunday Automobiles section. While this may seem like the story of a car enthusiast, Mr. Smith defies that label. He is an artist, not a car nut. He loves the aesthetics of American cars from decades past, but he doesn’t seem to care what engines they had.
Elgin Park is really about a sense of home, not about the cars, which are simply the actors in the scenes. Mr. Smith is the casting director, as well as set director, of a still-evolving story. The scenes spring from his boyhood memories of a Pennsylvania steel town, and the care he lavishes on his handmade buildings and street sets reflects the love he still feels for his hometown.
Mr. Smith does not give the impression of someone stuck in the past. In our interviews, he talked about starting a new chapter in his life and told me, “I guess I’m becoming a Buddhist.” Giving away some of his models and other possessions is part of that new journey.
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