Welcome to the City of Elgin Park.

Michael Paul Smith is the perfect example of an artist with a passion for what he does. For the last 25 years, he has spent some of his spare and much of his professional time making miniature models and photographing them, creating a gallery of vintage car photographs from a fictional 1950s American town called Elgin Park.

As a professional model maker, Smith’s models are detailed enough to withstand the scrutiny of close-up photography. Smith places them in miniature dioramas and uses forced perspective to make parts of the real world lend his pictures additional realism. The result is a quirky sort of historical fiction – faithfully and authentically reproduced scenes from a small American town that never actually happened (but could have).

What’s also great about his Elgin Park collection is that the magician is willing to…