hi everybody I'm Brianna and I partnered with a local photographer and his 1902 wet plate camera
to recreate the Cottingley fairy hoax photos exactly 101 years after the last photo was taken
I have been so enchanted by the Cottingley fairies and these photos for almost my whole life and I'm
very excited to bring you this project I think that the whole world has been Enchanted by
this story the BBC has once called it one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century this story is
about two young girls who photograph themselves with fairies in the English Countryside and the
entire world did believe that they were real the origins of this story go back to 1917 but
my Story begins about 80 years later in 1997 when my dad took my little sister and I to go see the
movie a fairy tale a true story and last spring when I was going through some of my keepsakes
I discovered that I still had my movie ticket from that day which is pretty wild because it
was a long time ago finding that movie ticket really sparked my interest back into the story
and I did some research and found that the girls used a butcher midge plate camera that dates
between 1902 and 1920 and it just so happens that the wet plate photographer that I work with Ken
his camera is from 1902. and so I thought wow this is a pretty wild uh synchronicity and so I reached
out to him to see if he'd be willing to recreate these photos with me and he said yes and so that
is how we got to recreate these photos using a very very similar camera from the same time period
as the Cottingley fairy photos I've split this video into three parts part one is going to be the
folklore of the story part two is going to be the process of preparing for the photo shoot and part
three is going to be the photo shoot itself which is very very very cool so let's jump into part one
in 1917 nine-year-old Francis Griffiths traveled to the English Countryside to visit with her 16
year old cousin Elsie Wright. the girls were known to tell stories about the fairies in their garden
and their forest and so they took a photo to prove their existence they took one photo in
July 1917 and another photo later that September when Elsie's parents saw these photos they thought
that they looked so very real and in 1919 Elsie's mother took the photos to a convention that was
going on about fairies and she had some experts analyze the photos and the experts did feel that
they were authentic and real the photos actually caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
the author of the Sherlock Holmes Stories the girls were asked to take three more photos and
so on August 19 1920 they took those photos and they were later published in Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's book The Coming of the fairies in 1922. decades later in 1983 the girls now much older in
their age admitted that the fairies and the photos were not real and that the whole thing just kind
of grew into something much bigger than they had ever intended after Francis had claimed she'd seen
fairies up the back both girls were teased by the adults Elsie hit on a scheme to stop the teasing
Elsa said one night we were getting ready for bed it was about if I draw some fairies and
cut them out in cardboard and we'll stick them up in the grass and take see if Uncle, uh, dad,
would let us use the camera to take a photograph so if they see them they'll have to believe it
they'll stop all this joking. Elsie said that she was inspired by a book called Princess Mary's gift
book that had a poem called a spell for a fairy Elsie drew the photos made cutouts and attached
hat pins to the back of the fairies to position them in the photos I said we uh the the long hat
pen put it down down the back like that the thing was that they could see them that the fairies were
moving and the photographs were staying but that's because they did it in the previous
I love that their inspiration was a poem called a spell for the fairies because this entire story
and these fairies actually did cast a spell on the whole world many articles have called this story a
Beacon of Hope and magic and that is because during the time that these photos were taken
there was a World War happening and so people just really really wanted something beautiful and
hopeful to um believe in and dream about and so I think that's one of the reasons that this story
unintentionally became as big as it did so let's move on to part two the process of preparing for
the photo shoot before we could take the photos I of course had to make my fairies and like the
girls I chose fairy artwork that was really inspiring to me and so I chose to use Cicley
Mary Barker's flower fairies for my fairies I have always always loved the flower fairy
artwork I scan and the fairies that I loved and that resembled the original fairies and so I ended
up making uh the same fairies in several different sizes so that we could see what worked best on the
wet plate film so you can see I made two different sizes of my lavender fairy and for each photo that
we took we ended up using the larger sized fairy for some of my fairies I attached wire to the back
or some wrapping so that I could wrap them around trees and I didn't have hat pins so I just kind of
used what I had and then I really wanted to add texture and flowers to the fairies because wet
plates really pick up texture and so I added these real dried flowers to my fairies some of them had
lavender or daisies and I also had a pansy fairy so now let's go into part three the photo shoot
which is so exciting I'm really excited to show you all of this footage we did our photo shoot
on July 16 2021 which is almost almost exactly 101 years after the last fairy photo was taken and the
original the very first photo was actually taken in July 1917 so I really love that kind of time
alignment we used a 1902 Century view wet plate camera for our photo shoot which takes black and
white pictures on glass or tin and you have to develop them on the spot so Ken has a portable
black room it's actually a van that he's converted into a black room luckily Ken and I have worked
together before so we have an understanding of each other's creative process and so we had that
really going for us without realizing it at the time we ended up taking our photos in the exact
same order that the girls took their photos in but in my mind I wanted to start with the most
difficult photo first and that was the group fairy photo so the original photo was taken
in front of a waterfall and we didn't have access to a waterfall and it was also summer time so we
took this photo in my enchanted forest and we placed the fairies on moss rocks in front of
me and that way we had more control over the height of the fairies for this photo my friend
made me a flower crown and between the flower crown and my outfit The Vibes of this photo
were very very folklore and very very mid-summer I really felt like an extra out of mid-summer and
so there were some serious Ari Aster Vibes going on and I kind of really loved that and the photo
itself ended up feeling very very folklore it was extremely difficult to get this photo we
ended up having to take two wet plates because the lighting was really difficult and so we had
to play around with the exposure so this photo actually took a couple hours to get the photo
that turned out the best is the one that had the longest exposure time and I think it was around
a minute and 30 seconds meaning I couldn't move for a minute and 30 seconds I really love though
that there's almost like this movement in my fairy so it does actually look like they're dancing my
fairies showed up a lot smaller I didn't realize how big the girl's fairies were and to be honest
if fairies were that big they wouldn't be so elusive so I feel like in hindsight the size of
the fairies in that photo is kind of a Telltale sign that they weren't real so the second photo
that we took was the second photo that the girls took in September of 1917 and this photo is of
Elsie sitting in the grass with the gnome I whipped up some magic and made the actual gnome
that was in the original photo I just uh resized the original photo and cut the gnome and worked
a little bit of computer magic and so I made two different sizes and of course we use the bigger
size which still ended up being a bit small one of the things that's really interesting about
this photo is that my hat is red and when I went back and did more research after the photo shoot
the girl said that the Gnomes hat was actually red in the photo and so I think that's a really fun
um coincidence this photo turned out so so beautifully the exposure the lighting everything
was absolutely perfect and it turned out really really crisp and I think that we couldn't have
asked for a better result and this ended up being Ken's favorite photo of the day the next few
photos were a part of that Commission in August of 1920 for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and our third
photo was my personal favorite photo of the photo shoot I think that's because between my outfit and
the way that the photo looks it has a very Tuck Everlasting Vibe and so I really really love
that this photo is a Francis sitting by a fairy really close to her face and there's a lot of
leaves and Greenery and behind her and so in order to create this I needed to have something
similar and luckily for us a tree had fallen in my yard a few days before the first photo
that we took was very bright and so we wanted to try it with a shorter exposure time but the first
photo ended up being my personal favorite and I think it's one of my most favorite photos that
Ken and I have ever taken together I also think that ours looks so so so similar to the original
I think that the 20s gnome photo and this photo were the ones that probably were the closest to
the originals and I'm very happy with how this one turned out so the fourth photo that we took
is the last fairy photo that we took but the girls did take five photos the setup for this photo was
very similar if not the same as the one before it I just took my hair down and we positioned
the new fairy very close to my face and the key was for me to look just past the ferry a little
bit and that was very important for the photo the position of my eyes I really like how this photo
turned out because you can really really see the texture in my face and in the photo and I think
that's really really cool this is the original I think that our photo version of this ended up
being the most different than the original but it was a solid effort we didn't take a lot of video
for this uh this particular photo because we're very tired by the end of the day but yeah this
photo turned out really cool so the girls did take five photos and the fifth photo does not
include the girls it's just actually something very mysterious and it looks like some fairies
doing something the resources that I found online said that what's in the photo is some kind of
fairy garment like a sheath or a cover that they would wear and it's become a bit of a symbol of
kind of fairy core like fairy culture and I think that it's very interesting the mystery surrounding
it and not the girls potentially had said that this was the only real photo and I think that
because of my experience with fairy magic I think that is very very possible that these young girls
had a real fairy Spirit experience in their Garden but in order to convince the whole world that it
was real they went through this whole process and so I think that the story is very very
very cool thank you so much for coming on this fairy Journey with me to Rediscover the magic
of the Cottingley fairies and of this really really beautiful and hopeful story and thank
you to Ken of course for helping me to recreate these photos these photo shoots are a lot of work
and I so appreciate it so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye [Music]
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