In the early 1970s Sydney photographer Leon Gregory was an aspiring actor who made ends meet by shooting portfolios for his fellow thespians. In his spare time he used his camera in classic street photography style taking photographs of random people that crossed his path.
Little did he know that forty years later his eclectic collection of shots of Sydney’s inner city enclaves – Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo, The Domain, the City, Glebe and Balmain – taken between 1970-1973 would prove somewhat of a time capsule.
Sitting in a box in the bottom of a wardrobe for decades Gregory’s negatives went untouched “until they were exhumed. I beat the silverfish to them,” he tells me laughing. “I’d hung onto the negatives because I knew I had some reasonable shots but many had never been printed so I decided to bring them into the digital world”.
