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Cottingley Fairies

escargot1 said:
but was believed and defended by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Can only shake my head.
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He appears to have had a change of views at some point and it's reflected in the Holmes canon, where there is a shift towards 'justice' and away from 'the law' in some cases set after 'The Final Solution'.
 
MrRING said:
Didn't the kids admit to faking the photographs, but insisted that they faked them after seeing the real thing?
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Ah the old "OK, I lied that last few times, but this time I'm really telling the truth, honest I am" ploy. Does that still work?
 
There is clearly a close relationship between the fairy-book illustrations - themselves a variant of the Three Graces' pose - and the images in the photographs. You can imagine chldren coming up with the notion of turning such images into a bit of photographic theatre. Cutting them out and propping them up would be a routine play-activity in those days of "penny-plain or twopence-coloured" sheets.

Yet what we see is nothing so straightforward! The drawings have been re-done in a very professional way. I have met some highly-gifted young artists and mimics but the lines of those fairies have the assured feel of a commercial artist at work. The scissors-work on those fluid shapes would also need to be prodigious.

I think some attempt has been made to reframe the supernatural theory by stretching it to cover the idea that the camera could be capturing the little people as thought-forms of the girls, imperfectly - yet very charmingly - recollected from the drawings.

I have to say that my abiding impression is that the photographs are a very professional piece of work. The appeal of Fairyland themes at the time is well-known; taken together with the fashion for spirit-communications, Doyle's vulnerability was typical of the period. His intelligence in other respects did not render him immune to fashion - from the same period we get Oliver Lodge's extensive spirit messages from his deceased son, Raymond. :smghost:
 
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The mystery photos in the FT prove that it was not only possible for the girls to fake the photos, but that others were doing so at almost exactly the same time. Like a meme?
 
EnolaGaia said:
Has anyone definitively matched a fairy figure in the photos to a fairy illustration from a contemporary book (or other print artifact)?
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They said it was Princess Mary's Gift Book, published in 1914. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

Edit: Aah, I see Min Bannister has beaten me to it! :D
 
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I think the girls were very likely inspired by spirit photography of the 19th century, which involved compositing photos, and as well, by then, Georges Méliès had already done wonderfully inventive things with film.
 
GNC said:
The mystery photos in the FT prove that it was not only possible for the girls to fake the photos, but that others were doing so at almost exactly the same time. Like a meme?
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Like, lots of people had a similar idea, who may or may not have been influenced by each other, possibly because helpful technology had become available?

The original fairy pictures, which look quaint to us, were convincing because they were bang up-to-date at the time. They are Art Nouveau fairies, prancing and dancing and only barely decently covered in flowing, wispy gowns: modern fairies, photographed with modern equipment. No wonder Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in! (Again!)
Like the 'spirit' photographers, the Cottingley girls had staunch followers who were undeterred by the scoffers because the hoax appeared so up-to-date.

Of course, the twist was that the girls' defence when rumbled was that there really were fairies present and the photos were a representation of real events. By then the damage was done and nobody believed a word they said.
 
This is an interesting 1901 Shorpy picture, which has likely used a 'Cottingley' style creative approach to make it work (this probable technical affiliation is referenced in the comments section below the picture)
3b22409u.jpg

http://www.shorpy.com/node/1269
 
escargot1 said:
Like, lots of people had a similar idea, who may or may not have been influenced by each other, possibly because helpful technology had become available?

The original fairy pictures, which look quaint to us, were convincing because they were bang up-to-date at the time. They are Art Nouveau fairies, prancing and dancing and only barely decently covered in flowing, wispy gowns: modern fairies, photographed with modern equipment. No wonder Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in! (Again!)
Like the 'spirit' photographers, the Cottingley girls had staunch followers who were undeterred by the scoffers because the hoax appeared so up-to-date.

Of course, the twist was that the girls' defence when rumbled was that there really were fairies present and the photos were a representation of real events. By then the damage was done and nobody believed a word they said.
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I don't give Doyle a lot of slack. People had already figured out what was going on, but dismissed the idea.
Doyle just desperately wanted to believe, and it made him a fool.
 
Shadowsot said:
I don't give Doyle a lot of slack. People had already figured out what was going on, but dismissed the idea.
Doyle just desperately wanted to believe, and it made him a fool.
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...'blind to reason'

I don't think we should brand him a fool, he was one of life's inarguable giants. I think if the term must be used, then let us apply it to those family members who were closest to the girls, yet allowed the saga to continue unchecked.

Others must have had insights, yet chose not to bring these up.
 
Ermintruder said:
...'blind to reason'

I don't think we should brand him a fool, he was one of life's inarguable giants. I think if the term must be used, then let us apply it to those family members who were closest to the girls, yet allowed the saga to continue unchecked.

Others must have had insights, yet chose not to bring these up.
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That's entirely fair, though I mean in the sense he had been been made a fool of.
He had been driven to find proof of the supernatural by great loss, having lost his son.

But there were suggestions that the girls had done as we now know. Drawn and cut out the figures then photographed them.
There dismissal was pretty lame, chiefly that no simple girls could develop such a hoax, and that their artistic talents weren't good enough to make the fairies.
I was going to add that Doyle had a good number of achievements under his belt working with the police. He wasn't as good as Sherlock, but he was a good detective in his own right.
But he let himself be taken in and made a fool by cons. Part of why he and Houdini fell out.
 
I think it's great that two little girls were so clued up and skilled enough all that
time ago to baffle so many people, and to keep the secret for so long is a
achievement in it's own right, even now there is some mystery surrounding this,
a wonderful story that must have brightened
many a day it did mine anyway, I like it.
 
escargot1 said:
On this picture the girl's hand is strangely elongated. I've never read an explanation of this.
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It's more proof the photo was manipulated ...

The fingertips were photographed (or overlaid in the darkroom ... ) with a small fairy figure. The composite hand / fairy was then patched into the larger photo of the girl, but was enlarged to make the fairy look bigger. The fingertips embedded with the fairy got bigger, too.

If you look closely you can see where the enlarged fingertips meet the actual-scale fingers of the girl in the subsuming photo. The 'seams' are pretty blatant.
 
RaM said:
Still think it was a dam fine effort for 2 little girls all but a 100 years ago
:salute::salute::salute:
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Agreed! Especially the fifth/sun bath one (if it's not real, of course!). The translucency on the central figure is really quite wonderful and, compared to the rest of the series, it really stands out in a 'one of these things is not like the others' kind of way.

As to the gnome one; I genuinely think the 'elongated hand' is just the girl's two hands overlapping. Obviously the photo/camera/film/plates weren't capable of capturing the finer details, so it's created a sort of optical illusion of long fingers. I can see, quite clearly, where the fingertips of one hand meet the fingers of the other; there's a sort of 'bend', that looks like a joint, but isn't (IMHO, obviously).
 
EnolaGaia said:
It's more proof the photo was manipulated ...

The fingertips were photographed (or overlaid in the darkroom ... ) with a small fairy figure. The composite hand / fairy was then patched into the larger photo of the girl, but was enlarged to make the fairy look bigger. The fingertips embedded with the fairy got bigger, too.

If you look closely you can see where the enlarged fingertips meet the actual-scale fingers of the girl in the subsuming photo. The 'seams' are pretty blatant.
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i think those 'seams' are what I see as where one hand meets the other; it IS pretty blatant, we just don't come to the same conclusion as to what's caused it.

I'm nothing like any kind of expert in photography, but I don't really see any signs of manipulation, just poor definition in the image :)
 
Fluttermoth said:
i think those 'seams' are what I see as where one hand meets the other; it IS pretty blatant, we just don't come to the same conclusion as to what's caused it. ...
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The considerably smaller fingers of her left hand (too small to be accounted for by perspective / distance alone) are visible in the background behind the elongated right hand.

The right hand's length from fingertip to wrist is approximately the same as her entire forearm from wrist to elbow. It should be more on the order of 50% the length of the forearm.

Here's a June 1917 photo of Elsie (smaller child on the right) with her cousin Frances:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies#/media/File:FrancesGriffithsandElsieWright.jpg

The proportions of her clearly visible right hand and forearm are wildly different from the photo with the fairy figure, which was taken only a month or two later (at most).
 
I lived in Bradford (Cottingley is on the outskirts) for 15 years from the early 60's and even back then it was amazing that the fairies were talked about often, and that some still believed that they were real. Even then I saw that the fairies looked in effect contemporary to the the time and wondered why people had been taken in - but a more innocent time obviously. I'm sure the girls would have been amused that their story would be talked about well into the next century. A lot of talent they had there.
 
I thought the girls just used cardboard cutouts in the pictures? That's what they look like.
 
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