Final
Reflection
Iconic
Images – Cottingley Fairies
In December of 1920 two photographs appeared in
an article of The Strand Magazine entitled
“Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event.” Immediately the country of
England, and shortly thereafter the world, was polarized. Were these images
real? Were they faked? Had concrete proof of fairies and the
supernatural finally been found? Even Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes
fame, weighed in on this argument, and in 1922 published a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in defense of what had became known as
the Cottingley Fairies photographs.[1] From
a modern standpoint, the entire hullabaloo created by these photographs is
quite entertaining; they are obvious fakes, but still the mythos surrounding
these photographs lives on today. Indeed one can trace the inspiration for a multitude
of examples of literature and film back to these images. The photographs
themselves have become iconic, but why? What is it about these photos that
continues to resonate with society today?
 |
| Frances and the Fairies, July 1917. |
“Iconology
is [the] 'intrinsic meaning of content' and requires a synthesis of
information, of pre-iconographical and iconographical information derived from
the work itself, as well as knowledge about the artistic, social and cultural
setting to which it belongs.”[2]
Therefore part of what makes an image iconic is how people interpret or
read it. This visual literacy of photographs is often broken into three aspects,
the “ ‘of’ – things shown in a photo; ‘about’ – the subject matter and
circumstances [the photograph was taken under]; and ‘abstract elements’—visual
expression.”[3]
These images are clearly ‘of’ a girl and supposed fairy, but what are these
photographs about? What ‘abstract elements’ are there? What makes an image
iconic depends on how the majority of society ‘reads’ it. As such, in order to
understand why these images are iconic in our current culture, one has to
examine the reason behind their creation and initial popularity.
 |
| Elsie and the Gnome, September 1917. |
In July of 1917, cousins Elsie
Wright, 16, and Frances Griffeths, 10, often played in the woods beyond their
home in Cottingley, England, and as would often happen to children at play,
they would come home dirty or in this case with both their dresses wet.[4] When their parents questioned the state of their clothes, the girls responded
that they were playing with fairies. Understandably, their parents didn’t
believe them. Annoyed, Elsie vowed to show them proof and, taking her father’s
camera into the woods, she and Frances soon produced two photographs of themselves
at play with the fairies in the Cottingley woods. However, the photographs
weren’t published until 1920, when they made their way into the hands of Edward
Gardner, a leading member of the Theosophical Society, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the
famous writer who in the later years of his life had become a devoted spiritualist.
Before they decided to publish the images, a photographic expert, a man by the
name of Mr. Snelling, came to the conclusion that the photographs were real, or
at least showed no signs of manipulation. “ ‘These two negatives are entirely
genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in
the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card
or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion, they
are both straight untouched pictures.’ ”[5]
Gardner and Doyle even sent the glass plate negatives to the Kodak Company for
a second opinion, who agreed with Mr. Snelling that the negatives themselves
showed no manipulation, but argued that there were a variety of other ways in
which a photograph might be faked. In fact one Kodak expert simply stated “the
photographs must be fakes since fairies do not exist.”[6]
 |
| Frances and the Leaping Fairy, August 1920. |
Undeterred,
Gardner made his way to Cottingley to meet with Elsie and Frances. Determined
to prove the photographs’ veracity, he bought a camera for each girl and two-dozen
negatives. Over the course of several weeks, the time span owing to the rarity
of sunny days in England, three more photographs of the fairies were captured.
Taking this as confirmation of the existence of fairies, the images were soon
published. Garner returned to Cottingley again in 1921, this time with Geoffrey
Hodson, a prominent clairvoyant, who claimed to see all sorts of fay creatures
there, including gnomes, wood-elves, nymphs and goblins. This time all
photographic attempts to capture the creatures failed.[7] This
did not stop either Gardner or Doyle from championing the photographs. In fact
it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s staunch support of the images that began to
undermine his own creditability. Newspapers around the world began to denounce
and poke fun at Doyle, “He’s beginning to strain our patience,” read one
editorial from the New York Times.[8] Another
wrote, “When Peter Pan called out to the audience… the famous question about
fairies, Conan Doyle was the first to give an affirmative.”[9] It
wasn’t until 1983 that the cousins finally broke their silence and admitted to
faking the photographs using paper dolls held up by hairpins, though Frances
went to her grave insisting that she did see fairies when she was younger.[10]
 |
| Fairy Offering a Posy to Elsie, August 1920. |
What was
it about these photographs that caused such a fervent reaction, both from
believers and non-believers alike? After all, photographers have “always been
able to manipulate the version of reality they choose to represent… and thus the
truth it conveys.”[11]
Why did this fabricated truth strike such a chord? Arthur Conon Doyle created
perhaps one of the most renowned literary characters known for logic and
rationality, and yet for Doyle these photographs had to be real. It has been
theorized that he believed in the photographs simply because he wanted to.[12]
However, it was more than that. For one, he did not believe that children
either had the technical knowledge to fake these images, nor the malevolent
nature to do so deliberately. [13] These
images, for him, represented not just the possible proof of the existence of
the supernatural, but also the innocence of childhood. This was the unique
contradiction behind the photographs. Even for those who readily denounced the
photographs as fakes, and could come up with several ways in which the images
might have been faked, they could not believe that two children would have been
able to manipulate the photographs without adult help. These photographs exemplify “how ideals of
childhood can blind adults to children’s actual capabilities, and how the young
can—and do—subvert these understandings.”[14] To
the greater public, these photographs played with the widespread and mostly
embraced Edwardian belief that if fairies did exist, only innocent children would
have the capacity to see them. Additionally, it was thought that a “photograph might permit a view of the
world that is ultimately more complete and thus more real than has previously
been possible,”[15] and
so it was not so unbelievable to think that a camera might capture elements of
the physical world that the rest of us couldn’t perceive. While the photographs
are ultimately, physically, of children playing with fairies, it was these
“adult imaginings of childhood innocence”[16]
that captured the public’s attention and imagination and still hold it today. Consequently, the “symbolic meanings and
abstract concepts that are communicated by images in the picture”[17]
become the most vital aspect of the photographs to both the individual viewer,
and society as a whole.
 |
| Fairies and Their Sun-Bath, August 1920. |
All photographs have meaning beyond
the physical constraints, or rather the ‘photographic truth’ of the image, and
it is this “photographic truth [that]
cannot exist in isolation without considering the collective influence of
ideas, experiences, culture, meaning, and contextualization.”[19] What
makes an image iconic for your parents’ generation might not transfer over to
your own generation as people’s ideals and views change over time. Iconic
images have to tell you something about the age we are presently living in.
Therefore, in order for an image to be iconic, it has to have the “ability to
abstract beyond historical details”[20]
of its time and provide a concrete representation of intangible shared cultural
concepts.[21] It
must have an element of timelessness to it, in order for subsequent generations
to continue to relate to. With the case of the Cottingley Fairies Photographs,
it is their very subject matter that helps with this immutability. “Fairies are
not subject to the alterations of time, they convey an idea of permanence, and
by extension, a nostalgia for the stability of the past, or a permanent state
of childhood innocence.”[22]
 |
Eva Stenram, Absent Fairies, 2004; lambda print. Based on Frances and the Fairies (1917) by Elsie Wright.
|
Iconography
allows for the “the identification
of images
representing certain ideas, themes, or concepts, as in stories or allegories,” to be discernable
across different levels of society.[23]
The evidence that the Cottingley Fairy Photographs are iconic and thus
still relevant today, is that they continue to be used and referred to in order
to highlight or draw attention to current events, cultural movements, and
ideals. The story of these photographs was told in two separate films, both
released in 1997, each one directed to a different audience. Fairy Tale: A True Story is a childrens’
movie which plays on the ideas of childhood innocence, fantasy, and an adult’s
inability to see the truth of the supernatural. Indeed at the end of this film,
the fairies turn out to be real.[24] Photographing
Fairies, also known as Apparition
in the United States, is “a thinking man’s fairy movie” that deals with the
complex ideas of grief and the mental and physical repercussions of it.[25] The
artist Eva Stenram, in her exhibit Despoiling
the Ideal, explored whether the meaning of photographs can transcend their
individual elements. She manipulated or removed aspects of photographs to see
if they still had the same power. Eva used one of the first fairy photographs
taken in 1917 to illustrate that even with the removal of the fairy props, it
is still “simply a photograph of a girl day-dreaming; her imagination remains
invisible even though it’s the thematic content of the photo. This is still a
picture of a young girl seeing fairies.”[26] In Francesca Lia Block’s book, I was a Teenage Fairy, she uses the
Cottingley Fairy Photographs to create a “rich abstract [that] challenges readers
to rethink ideas about childhood… [And] adults’ sometimes prurient and
exploitative fascination with youthful innocence.”[27]
In the book, Block delves deeply into the culture surrounding child exploitation
and the lack of attention given by the media to the devastating and lasting
effects of such abuse as she “creatively reworks this hoax to transform
readers’ contemplation of and empathy with the reality and legacy of sexual
abuse.”[28]
But the current uses of the
Cottingley Fairy Photographs go beyond artistic or literary explorations. In
social media, the use of these images or even just the depiction of fairies is
used to draw attention to and highlight certain aspects of current events. In
2011, Mohammed El Masry, an Egyptian living in Cairo during the uprisings
witnessed several violent, and often deadly, clashes between protestors and
police forces. The photo journalistic documentation of these bloody events, to
him, idealized the events by transforming them from bloody and violent protests
into scenes of epic heroism. In order to deal with the events surrounding him,
and the contradiction within them that he saw portrayed in mass media, he used
the depiction of fairies and other supernatural elements as an iconoclastic
attempt that was “fit for [an] Egyptian audience’s sense of humor when
confronting authority and facing crisis.”[29]
 |
‘Breaking
news: Cairo, winged species make appearance in Mohamed Mahmoud Street’.
From: Mohamed El Masry, Digital Photomontage from ‘Breaking News’ collective, 2011
|
The Cottingley Fairy Photographs strike at the heart of our
imagination - at that time in childhood when we believed anything was possible
and anything could and did exist, from the monster under our beds to fairies in
the woods. They represent a time gone past, both the idealized Victorian era,
and our own more recent childhoods, where we romanticize that everything was
simpler. Elsie Wright, in an interview with BBC in1971, even as evidence was
piling up against the authenticity of the photographs, still insisted that
whatever else the photographs were, they were “figments of our imagination.”[30] Iconic images represent the ideals that
we, as a person or society can relate to through our individual and shared
experiences. It doesn't matter if they're staged or candid, only that they
strike a chord within us. So yes, these images were technically a lie, but the
truth or lack thereof isn't what make these pictures iconic. The sensational
nature of the photographs might have been what originally captured the public’s
attention, but it is the ideas that resonate behind the photographs that
continue to hold it and make the pictures iconic. In truth it matters little
what an iconic picture depicts, what makes them stand the test of time is the
ideals behind the image. In that sense we as a culture have iconic ideals that
are represented through photographs. And as a medium, photography is perfectly
posed to show a “camera's
potential for forging links with a specifically imagined past.”[31]
[1]
Juliette Wood, “Filming Fairies: Popular Film, Audience Response, and Meaning
in Contemporary Fairy Lore,” Folklore
117 no. 3 (Dec 2006): 288.
[2]
Sara Shatford, “Analysing the Subject of a Picture: A Theoretical Approach,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly
6 no. 3 (Spring 1986): 45.
[3]
Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Diane Vogt-O’Conner, Photographs: Archival Care and Management, (Chicago: Society of
American Archivists, 2006): 62.
[4]
Lee A. Talley, “Fantasies of Place and Childhood in Francesca Lia Block’s I Was
a Teenage Fairy,” Children’s Literature
39, no. 1 (2011): 108-109.
[5] S.
F. Sanderson, “The Cottingley Fairy Photographs: A Re-Appraisal of
the Evidence,” Folklore 84 no.
2 (Summer 1973): 92.
[6]
Ibid., 93.
[7]
Ibid., 98.
[8]
Tom Huntington, “The Man Who Believe in Fairies: for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Creator of Sherlock Holmes, the Proof was in the Pictures,” Smithsonian 28 no.
6 (Sept 1997): 110.
[9]
Vicki Goldberg, “Photographic View: Of Fairies, Free Spirits and Outright
Frauds,” New York Times (New York, NY),
Feb. 1, 1998.
[10]
Eva Stenram, “Despoiling the Ideal,” Critical
Photograph Series (2013): 19.
[11]
Ritzenthaler, Photographs: Archival Care
and Management, 8.
[12]
Goldberg, “Photographic View,” Feb. 1, 1998.
[13]
Talley, “Fantasies of Place and Childhood,” 109-110.
[14]
Ibid., 109.
[15]
Jennifer Green-Lewis, “ ‘Already the Past’: The Backward Glance of Victorian
Photography.” English Language Notes 44
no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 30.
[16]
Talley, “Fantasies of Place and Childhood,” 109.
[17]
Shatford, “Analysing the Subject of a Picture,” 45.
[18]
Wood, “Filming Fairies,” 292.
[19]
Glenn Porter and Michael Kennedy, “Photographic Truth and Evidence,” Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences
44 no. 2 (Jun 2012): 187.
[20]
Eric Jenkins, “My iPod, My iCon: How and Why Images Become Icons,” Conference Papers – National Communication
Association (Nov 2007): 15.
[21]
Ibid., 11.
[22]
Wood, “Filming Fairies,” 282.
[23]
Shatford, “Analysing the Subject of a Picture,” 44.
[24]
Wood, “Filming Fairies,” 290-291.
[25]
Ibid., 288.
[26]
Stenram, “Despoiling the Ideal,” 19-20.
[27]
Talley, “Fantasies of Place and Childhood,” 108.
[28]
Ibid., 108.
[29]
Nagla Samir, “Iconoclasm: The Loss of Iconic Image in Art and Visual
Communication,” Technoetic Arts: A
Journal of Speculative Research 11 no. 3 (2013): 338.
[30] Sanderson,
“The Cottingley
Fairy Photograph,” 103.
[31]
Green-Lewis “ ‘Already the Past’,” 26.
Goldberg,
Vicki. “Photographic View: Of Fairies, Free Spirits and Outright Frauds.” New York Times (New York, NY), Feb. 1,
1998.
Green-Lewis,
Jennifer. “ ‘Already the Past’: The Backward Glance of Victorian Photography.” English Language Notes 44 no. 2
(Fall/Winter 2006): 25-43.
Huntington, Tom. “The Man Who Believe in Fairies: for Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, Creator of Sherlock Holmes, the Proof was in the Pictures.” Smithsonian
28 no. 6 (Sept 1997): 104-113.
Jenkins,
Eric. “My iPod, My iCon: How and Why Images Become Icons.” Conference Papers – National Communication Association (Nov 2007):
1-39.
Porter,
Glenn and Michael Kennedy. “Photographic Truth and Evidence.” Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences
44 no. 2 (Jun 2012): 183-192.
Ritzenthaler,
Mary Lynn and Diane Vogt-O’Conner. Photographs:
Archival Care and Management. Chicago: Society of American Archivists,
2006.
Samir,
Nagla. “Iconoclasm: The Loss of Iconic Image in Art and Visual Communication.” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative
Research 11 no. 3 (2013): 335-341.
Sanderson, S. F. “The Cottingley Fairy
Photographs: A Re-Appraisal of the Evidence.” Folklore 84 no. 2 (Summer 1973): 89-103.
Shatford,
Sara. “Analysing the subject of a Picture: A Theoretical Approach.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly
6 no. 3 (Spring 1986): 39-62.
Stenram, Eva. “Despoiling the Ideal.” Critical Photograph Series (2013):
17-32.
Talley, Lee
A. “Fantasies of Place and Childhood in Francesca Lia Block’s I Was a Teenage
Fairy.” Children’s Literature 39, no.
1 (2011): 107-115.
Wood,
Juliette. “Filming Fairies: Popular Film, Audience Response, and Meaning in
Contemporary Fairy Lore.” Folklore
117 no. 3 (Dec 2006): 279-296.
Cottingley
Fairies Photographs from:
Bose, Alex. "The Cottingley
Fairies." Museum of Hoaxes.
2015. http://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/the_cottingley_fairies/.
The other images were from their corresponding
article.
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