Greg Neville, Man in the Street 1, 2015

My new solo exhibition, Man in the Street, opens at Tacit gallery on June 10.

The source of these images is my collection of Edwardian travel postcards, views of New York, London and other cities at the start of the 20th century.

These postcards show big city streets and tall buildings, but in the details you can find tiny human figures, a few millimetres in size, who happened to be captured by the camera. Enlarged to make gallery-size prints, the figures are fragmented by the printers dots and have an elemental quality, bordering on abstraction.

These anonymous individuals are caught up in their busy work, or stand motionless, seemingly lost in thought. Since they were photographed more than a century ago, they are long dead, but the camera brings them back to life, at least provisionally.

The exhibition opens at Tacit Contemporary Art, 312 Johnston St Abbotsford, on June 10, from 6.30 to 8pm. It runs until June 21.

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