What’s the best thing you could find in a cupboard? Is it your birth certificate, an old edition of Test Match the board game, a fourth Nintendo 64 controller? Nope. It’s a time machine.
Like Vivian Maier, the work of septuagenarian Sydney man Leon Gregory could have been lost forever. Fortunately, the amateur Sydney street photographer who will soon present his work at exhibition for the first time ever chanced upon a forgotten trove of undeveloped negatives in a mouldy cupboard somewhere and finally decided to develop them.
As you can see it’s an arresting vision of Sydney in the early seventies.
This is part of a much larger collection of images photographed by Gregory capturing the inner Sydney area between 1970-1973. The original negatives of these works have only recently been recovered and digitised with suburbs covered including Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo, The Domain, the City, Glebe and Balmain. The digital files of these images are to be acquired for the permanent collection of the State Library of NSW with a selection of his work to be exhibited as “At Last – The Seventies!” a solo exhibition at Ginko gallery in Glebe as part of Sydney’s Head On Photo Festival.
WHAT: “At Last – The Seventies!” by Leon Gregory.
WHERE: Ginko Gallery, 166 St Johns Road, Glebe, NSW, 2037.
WHEN: May 24 – June 12
For more head to the Head On Festival website.
