Despite working on (and editing at one stage) the British Journal of Photography for 40 odd years, Geoffrey Crawley was perhaps most famous for blowing the lid off the Cottingley Fairies photography hoax in the '80s, where two young cousins fooled the world in 1917 with their photos of some fairies at the bottom of their garden.
Crawley also invented the eco-friendly developer for monochromatic film FX-55.
The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 10. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, as a Spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted that the images were genuine, but others believed they had been faked.
Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls grew up, married and lived abroad for a time. 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. ...
The photographs and two of the cameras used are on display in the National Media Museum in Bradford. ...
In 1983, the cousins admitted in an article published in the magazine The Unexplained that the photographs had been faked, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies. ... In a 1985 television interview on Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling the author of Sherlock Holmes: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet." In the same interview Frances said: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in."[33]
via Legendary Photographer and Cottingley Fairies Hoax-Exposer Geoffrey Crawley Has Died.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Legendary Photographer and Cottingley Fairies Hoax-Exposer Geoffrey Crawley Has Died
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3 comments:
You mean those weren't real ! ;-O
The greatest hoax picture creator..
Actually I can't believe anyone was fooled by those images . But I'm looking at them from a different time . We can't judge them today . We are used to seeing photo manipulations . People back then probably thought if you saw it in a photo it must be real .
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