"I do believe in fairies, I do, I do...."

 During research for a project at Uni, I stumbled across the story of the Cottingley Faires. I remember being a kid and being fascinated when watching the film Fairy Tale based on the story. Two teenage cousins borrowed their uncle/dad’s camera and went down to the bottom of the garden where they took photos of what they claimed were fairies. You can imagine the surprise on the father’s face when he was in his darkroom developing the photos of the girls, only for a fairy to appear dancing in front of them. However he didn’t believe that they were real, although he couldn’t figure out what trickery they had performed. Eventually the photos found their way into the hands of Edward Gardner, the leader of a spiritualist group. Gardner sent the photos and negatives off to a photographic expert to be examined, the result, he was told, was the there had been no tampering with the negatives, the expert did not go as far as to say that the photos showed fairies but that "these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera at the time". They also came to the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle who, like Gardner, insistently believed they were genuine photos of fairies. Looking at the photos now, they are so fake looking, crude and badly done that it’s hard to think that anybody, least of all an intelligent, well-educated writer such as Conan Doyle would ever believe these were real. Both spiritualists, they published the photos as proof that fairies existed. The girls later admitted that the photos were fakes, that they had copied drawings of fairies from storybooks onto card and propped them up in front of the camera. Yet two children, with little to no photographic expertise managed to fool the World. How and why did they manage it? Who knows, maybe people just really wanted to believe that there was more out there. Maybe they were fooled because they wanted to be fooled…?

I find it interesting that when someone has a photograph of something, we almost immediately take it for granted that it is real, photography is the medium we trust to show us the truth. With all the images that surround us today we tend to take them at face value. The images on the news are there to pose as proof that the story is real, that these events and these people are really in the World somewhere. I just find it interesting that photos are used as a representation of reality in an age where digital alternation is so easy and assessable to whoever wants it. And we are all guilty of it, myself included. I know that the women in fashion magazines have been Photoshopped to perfection, yet it still doesn’t stop me from having those few seconds where I think “wow she has the most perfect skin/boobs/legs, why can’t mine be like that”. And then I have to remind myself, it’s NOT REAL. Who knows, maybe in 50 years time people will look back on airbrushed images of our time and think “that’s so fake and badly done, how can anyone have ever thought that was reality”.