Friday, 11 May 2012

Cottingley Fairies..


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.

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