Elgin Park was conceived상상하다 and built by a 60-year-old unemployed designer from Boston named Michael Paul Smith. Michael never really intended for Elgin Park to become a tourist attraction. That just happened. He really built the whole town just for him to look at. “How many buildings?” “I have 15.” “And how many cars?” “300”

300. How can anyone let alone an unemployed designer afford that? “It's actually not as expensive as you might think.” “That only exists in miniature, and in my mind, and in my heart, too.” By combining miniature foregrounds with real backgrounds, “Actually it's really perfect,” Michael is able to produce extraordinarily convincing photographs at least when we're not here, he can.

So far he’s created more than 200 pictures which have attracted more than 20 million visitors to the web. Some think it's a real place and want directions, but most are just smitten홀딱 반한 with the sentiment Michael captures using nothing more than that $75 sure shot camera. “A French fashion photographer wrote to me, and he says I want to know your lenses, you know, a fabulous……..bula bula…. And I told him what it was, what the camera was, and he wrote back, once he says, you lie.”

Michael says the secret is actually in the details. In this picture is inside this house on the wall back in there. The man's even got miniature mud. “This is the perfect thing. The dirt that comes out of the vacuum.” The only thing noticeably missing from his pieces are people and that's by design. He wants folks to be able to picture themselves in the photos. Many take him literally, photo shopping themselves into the scenes like a time traveler’s postcard that reads, having a great time, wish you were then.

It's Americana, but they're eating it up everywhere. Michael says responses pouring in from Russia, South Africa, even Thailand. I can see why. That is very cool. It's cool.