Elsie Wright - Cottingley Faeries

The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright (1900–88) and Frances Griffiths (1907–86), two young cousins who lived in Cuttingly near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on faeried he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of physic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, but others believed they had been faked.

Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls married and lived abroad for a time after they grew up, yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination. In 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned to the UK. Elsie left open the possibility that she believed she had photographed her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in the story.

In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children's book of the time, but Frances maintained that the fifth and final photograph was genuine. The photographs and two of the cameras used are on display in the National Media Museum in Bradford.

The image on the right, although being a staged image shows the attitude of the young girl is not afraid of the supernatural beings infront of her. Obviously because they are not real but this is the attitude she wanted the public to see when the images were released, that faeries were creatures to be respected and not afraid of. She wears flowers in her hair, which seems to be a trend that faeries and flowers are related hand in hand. Did the girl think she was a life-size faeries perhaps?

The same confident attitude is conveyed by the second sister in the third image in the series of 5. She is in woodland and has 'stumbled' across the faerie and is now face to face with her. It is hard to annotate these images as thoroughly as the images prior as they are images not taken by a photographer and created by a team but simply by two young girls. However the association with faeries and children is a strong one that should also be considered to develop my research.