The
Cottingley Fairies appear in a
series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two
young cousins who lived in Cottingley,
near Bradford in England. In
1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and
Frances was 10. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who
used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been
commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand
Magazine. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist,
was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and
visible evidence of psychic
phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, but
others believed they had been faked.
At
the time of 1917, the victorian era, it was a very austere period in time and
these photographs really evoked peoples imaginations as even specialists
believed them to be real.
This
is what I hope to create, a small spark of belief inside the viewer and just
for a second they can say they believe in something they haven’t since child
hood.
No comments:
Post a Comment