#elsie wright

[blondebrainpowered]

In 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 9-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths took photos with the “Cottingley Fairies” in the village of Cottingley, near Bingley in West Yorkshire. One of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century, they only admitted the photos were faked in 1983.

[archivist-crow]

The Cottingley Fairies - Part 1

This is another hoax re-creation, based on the Cottingley Fairies series of photos by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths beginning in 1917. There are a lot of reasons I love this hoax—the entirely basic, but effective, practical effects; the fact that they managed to fool a great many people, including no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who publicly championed the photos as proof of fairies; and then there’s the photos themselves. For the time, they’re very well done for a 16 and a 9 year old, and I find them both technically and aesthetically pleasing.

Photograph #1 - Frances with fairies, taken by Elsie Wright (1917)

Photograph #2 - Elsie with winged gnome, taken by Frances Griffiths (1917)

At one point, I thought I would be dressing up the larger figure as Elsie and Frances, but as I got further into the project I decided it wasn’t necessary. I kinda liked the reversal of having an obviously fake “human” with more realistic fairies.

“The Cottingley Fairies, No. 1” (2019)

“The Cottingley Fairies, No. 2” (2019)

Scale: HO (1:87) / 1:12

Photos by the archivist-crow unless otherwise noted

[caedmonofwhitby]

The Dancing Fairy, 1922

Frances Griffiths, Elsie Wright

The Cottingley Fairies series of photographs

Cornell University Library

With cousin Frances Griffiths, Elsie Wright experimented with photography in her teenage years. Griffiths and Wright created photographs featuring "fairies" in their back garden in Cottingley. The photographs later caught the attention of Edward Gardner of the Theosophical Society and Arthur Conan Doyle, who had become interested in the paranormal following the death of his eldest son during the First World War.

Conan Doyle arranged for cameras to be given to Elsie and Frances so that they could take some more fairy pictures. The girls managed to produce three further ‘fairy’ photographs; these, together with the original two, were reproduced in the Strand Magazine and in Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922. The photographs grew in notoriety and spread across the world.

Though media interest subsided, the ‘Cottingley fairies’ continued to capture the public imagination. Elsie and Frances were interviewed in magazines and on radio and television; in 1978 the BBC broadcast a 'Play of the Week' based on their story, entitled Fairies. It was not until 1983, however, that the full story was revealed, when Elsie and Frances finally admitted that the photographs were fakes and that the fairies were in fact nothing more than cardboard cut-outs.

[phantomleaves]

gaslight gatekeep girlboss

[lemaldusiecle]

Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, the Cottingley girls, photographed in 1920s.

[swirley1618]

[pixerinawitcherina]

[ladysparrow01]

The Cottingley Fairies

A seriese of five photographs taken by cousins Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9). The photographs were initially believed to be genuine images of the girls with Faeries they had met in the beck. But later in life the two admitted that they had created the Faery figures by tracing the illustrations from Princess Mary's Gift Book.

Even still, Frances was adiment all her life that the fifth and final photo was truly genuine.

"It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we were just mooching about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared. I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph."