About: Elgin Park

Elgin Park was a perpetual miniature imaginary village created by artist and photographer Michael Paul Smith in 2008. It was a 1:24-scale recreation of everyday scenes from mid-20th-century America, ranging from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, based loosely on Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where Smith lived for the first seventeen years of his life. Smith, who was "founder, chief architect and mayor" of Elgin Park, photographed with his digital camera, using forced perspective, meticulously arranged scenes from the village and shared them online. Each photograph was a self-contained miniature play, meant to be viewed as a window into his memories and imagination.