The Cottingley Fairy
By the end of World War One the English were emotionally bruised and battered from four years of unrelenting bloodshed and horror. They seemed to be in need of something that would reaffirm their belief in goodness and innocence, and they found it in a series of haunting fairy photographs taken by two young girls in a garden outside of a home in Cottingley, Yorkshire.
(Top: Frances with the dancing fairies taken on july 1917.
Above: Elsie with the gnome.)
The two young girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, initially took two photographs in 1917 to prove to their parents that they really had been playing with fairies outside in the garden, as they had claimed. The photographs showed the girls posing while delicate, winged creatures danced around them. A local photographic expert was shown the photos, who proclaimed them to be genuine, unretouched images. And once they had received this official stamp of approval, the fairy images soon began circulating through upper class British society.
(top and above: taken on 1920 by the two girls. Top Frances with the leaping fairy and above Fairy Offering a Posy to Elsie.)
Eventually the photos came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Doyle was a passionate believer in spiritualism, and he immediately latched onto the images, convinced that they were conclusive photographic proof of the existence of supernatural fairy beings. Doyle publicly made this argument in an article he wrote for Strand magazine in 1920. When the girls provided him with three more fairy photographs, he wrote a second article. Doyle's passionate belief in the reality of the fairies helped to make the two girls famous, and it sparked a national controversy that pitted spiritualists against skeptics.
Above: the only picture said to be genuine by Frances. Fairies and Their Sun-Bath taken on 1920.
It was not until 1978 that a researcher noticed that the fairies in the pictures were almost identical to fairy figures in a children's book called Princess Mary's Gift Book, which had been published in 1915 shortly before the girls took the photographs.
Many years later, in 1981, the two cousins confessed that the fairies in four of the pictures were, in fact, paper cutouts from this book. They had held the fairies in place with hatpins. But they insisted that one of the photographs—the one of the fairy sunbath that contained no people in it—was real.
To the modern eye the fairies in the photographs seem quite obviously to be paper cutouts, making it all the more incredible that the controversy surrounding them lasted so long. But the photos still manage to project a sensation of dreamy, childlike innocence. The five images remain one of the most famous photographic hoaxes of all time.
