"I Have Convinced Myself": The Cottingley Fairies and the Desire to Believe
In 1917, Francis Griffiths and Elsie Wright, nine and sixteen years old respectively, borrowed a camera from Elsie's father to provide proof that they saw fairies near Cottingley Beck. Elsie's father dismissed the two resulting photos as a prank; Elsie's mother, who developed an interest in Theosophy, brought the photos to the attention of her local Theosophical Society in 1919.
The journey of these two photos, along with three subsequent ones, would become an international sensation, drawing in Spiritualists, skeptics, Kodak technicians, and one of the era's most famous writers.
What motivated the creation of these images? And what made them so compelling that the British Journal of Photography would publish a ten-part exposé on them decades later, in 1983?