A young lady (top) poses on a swing in a photographer's studio. Except, she isn't really on a swing. Nineteenth-century photographers needed their subjects to remain stationary in order to get the proper focus and exposure. So swinging back and forth was out of the question. The swing was actually a prop available from a catalog (bottom). The ropes remained rigid and were not attached to anything above.

Alaskan prospector Dick Willoughby claimed he snapped this photo in June 1888 while looking out over Muir Glacier in southeastern Alaska. He said that it showed a mirage of a "silent city" that could be seen emerging from the mists. He speculated that the city was actually the reflection of a real city thousands of miles away in Russia.

The photo attracted controversy in 1889 when San Francisco papers acquired copies of it. Photographic experts were skeptical, and Prof. Otto J. Klots, chief astronomer of the Department of the Interior at Ottawa, insisted that "such a thing as the reflections of a city thousands of miles away would be an utter impossibility."

Nevertheless Willoughby managed to sell thousands of copies of the picture and took many people on guided tours to see the mirage. However, when the San Francisco Examiner sent a correspondent to track down the mirage, he couldn't find anything.

The San Francisco Chronicle eventually solved the mystery when an employee of Wells Fargo notified them that he recognized the scene as the skyline of Bristol, England, "the view being from a public park on Brandon Hill. There is a Catholic cathedral there, the main building of which was completed about two centuries ago."

Apparently Willoughby had acquired a blurry photo of Bristol from a stranded English photographer, whose equipment he bought for $10, and he came up with the idea of passing off the photo as an image of a "silent city" mirage. Even after the photo had been debunked, interest in it (and the supposed mirage) continued. In 1890 Willoughby sold the negative to a San Francisco photographer for $500. Willoughby died two years later.

David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, published an article in Popular Science Monthly describing the discovery of a new form of photography that he called Sympsychography. Starr explained that it allowed invisible brain waves to be made visible on a photographic plate -- similar to the way in which invisible X rays produce an image on a photographic plate.

The first test of sympsychography, Starr wrote, had been conducted by Cameron Lee, who burned an image of a cat onto a photographic plate merely by thinking of a cat. The Astral Camera Club, which met on April 1, then took the concept one step further. Seven of its members simultaneously concentrated their minds on a photographic plate while thinking of a cat. What emerged was not one man's image of a cat, but rather a joint "impression of ultimate feline reality." The resulting picture (shown here) was reproduced in the article.

Starr wrote, "it will be noticed that this picture is unmistakably one of a cat. But it is a cat in its real essence, the type cat as distinguished from human impressions of individual cats."

Jordan thought the readers of Popular Science Monthly would immediately recognize his article as a joke. Instead he received numerous letters from people who had taken the article at face value. One clergyman even confided to Starr that he had prepared six sermons on "the Lesson of the Sympsychograph."

A bear joins its hunters for a friendly group photo, somewhere in the Utah wilderness.

A group of men show off this sea serpent that washed up on the beach at Ballard, Washington. However, the "sea serpent" appears to be the trunk of a tree.

Postcards had been around since 1869, but it wasn't until 1894 that pictures began to be printed on them. The photo postcards were an immediate success. Their popularity inspired photographers to experiment with ways to add more humor to them, and soon they had translated the idiom of the tall tale into visual form, creating tall-tall postcards, also known as "freak" or "trick" postcards.

Oversized crops and animals were a popular theme, especially in the Midwest where farmers got a kick out of sending pictures showing corn as big as trees and cabbages larger than barns to relatives back east. The oversized farm and dairy products evoked the idea of easy abundance at the heart of the American dream. The deeper joke was that these were actually hard years for America's farmers, which gave these cards an edge of dark humor.

William "Dad" Martin of Ottawa, Kansas was one of the masters of the genre and a great innovator in the art of photo fakery. His work was characterized by a fine attention to detail and lifelike effects. Martin's company, the Martin Post Card Company, made him a wealthy man. Fliers for his business read, "This is Dad Martin. He has been arrested for hunting. He is a fool about fishing. But wise on photography."

Martin was particularly good at portraying action in his trick postcards, as can be seen in the top image ("I Finally Got Him"). This set him apart from his peers whose images tended to be static and rather dull.

The middle image, "Bringing in the Sheaves," referred to a well-known hymn:


The bottom image, "The Modern Farmer," is interesting since it shows an automobile. In 1909 cars were still newer than photography itself, and Martin often featured them in his postcards. Today these postcards are particularly sought after by collectors.

A postcard created by Alfred Stanley Johnson of Waupun, Wisconsin. The top image shows the original, unedited picture which Johnson used to create the trick effect. The children posed, holding wooden props. Johnson then cut and pasted a picture of a watermelon slice into this picture to create the finished postcard (bottom): an illusion of a children's party featuring a giant watermelon.

Tall-tale postcards experienced the peak of their popularity from 1905 to 1915, but cards of this kind are still being created and sent today. And the internet, combined with software that makes it easier than ever to manipulate images, has breathed new life into the genre of tall-tale photography.

Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst was notorious for allowing his newspapers to recaption photos creatively. In 1913 one of his papers, the New York American, ran a photo of children, their hands raised above their heads, standing in the ocean. Many other papers then reprinted the photo. The caption read:


The picture had not been altered, but the caption was entirely false. Milward protested that, in reality, the children had been playing happily, and that they had raised their arms at his request in order to make a better picture. What's more, the photo was taken in British Honduras, not Mexico.

In 1920 a series of photos of fairies captured the attention of the world. The photos had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie's Cottingley village home. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared them genuine. Spiritualists promoted them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures, and despite criticism by skeptics, the pictures became among the most widely recognized photos in the world. It was only decades later, in the late 1970s, that the photos were definitively debunked.


During World War I, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths, who was from South Africa, moved into the English home of her aunt and uncle, the Wrights, while her father fought in the war. She and her cousin, thirteen-year-old Elsie, often played together in the large garden of the family's Cottingley village home.

In July 1917 the pair asked to borrow the camera of Elsie's father, telling him they wanted to take a photo of the fairies they had been playing with all morning. Elsie's father laughingly agreed and showed them how to use the camera. An hour later the girls returned, declaring their project a success. And when Mr. Wright developed the plate that evening, he could see that there did indeed appear to be a fairy posing with Frances in the photo. However, he dismissed the girls' explanation, assuming the picture was some kind of trick. He asked Elsie why there appeared to be "bits of paper" in the photo.

Even when the girls took a second photo a little over a month later, showing Elsie with a gnome, the father treated the images as a joke and filed them away.

However, Elsie's mother, Polly Wright, had a stronger belief in the supernatural, and was more intrigued by the photos. In 1919 she attended a lecture on spiritualism and following it, she showed the photos to the speaker, asking him if they "might be true after all." The speaker brought the photos to the attention of Edward Gardner, a leader of the Theosophical movement, who in turn asked a photographer, Harold Snelling, to examine them. Snelling declared the photos were "genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in all the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc."

Once they had received this stamp of approval, the fairy images began circulating throughout the British spiritualist community, and soon came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Doyle was a passionate believer in spiritualism, and he latched onto the images, convinced they were conclusive photographic proof of the existence of supernatural fairy beings.

At Doyle's urging, the girls took three more pictures of fairies in August 1920. Doyle then wrote an article about the photographs that appeared in the December 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine, in which he passionately argued for the authenticity of the images. This article brought the photos to the attention of the wider public and sparked an international controversy that pitted spiritualists against skeptics.


Shown below are the five Cottingley fairy photos, in the order in which they were taken. The text of the accompanying descriptions comes from Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel by Edward Gardner (published 1945).

#1. Frances and the Fairies. Taken July 1917. Camera: Midg Quarter. "The negative was a little over-exposed. The waterfall and rocks are about 20 feet distance behind Frances, who is standing in shallow water inside the bank of the beck. The colouring of the fairies was described by the girls as shades of green, lavender and mauve, most marked in the wings and fading to almost pure white in the limbs and drapery."


#2. Elsie and the Gnome. Taken September 1917. Camera: Midg Quarter. "Elsie was playing with the gnome and beckoning it to come on to her knee. The gnome leapt up just as Frances, who had the camera, snapped the shutter. He is described as wearing black tights, a reddish jersey and a pointed bright red cap. Elsie said there was no perceptible weight, though when on the bare hand the feeling is like a 'little breath'. The wings were more moth-like than the fairies and of a soft neutral tint. Elsie explained that what seem to be markings on his wings are simply his pipes, which he was swinging in his grotesque little left hand."


#3. Frances and the Leaping Fairy. Taken August 1920. Camera: Cameo Quarter. "The fairy is leaping up from the leaves below and hovering for a moment—it had done so three or four times. Rising a little higher than before, Frances thought it would touch her face, and involuntarily tossed her head back. The fairy's light covering appears to be close fitting: the wings were lavender in colour."


#4. Fairy Offering a Posy to Elsie. Taken August 1920. Camera: Cameo Quarter. "The fairy is standing almost still, poised on the bush leaves. The wings were shot with yellow. An interesting point is shown in this photograph: Elsie is not looking directly at the sprite. The reason seems to be that the human eye is disconcerting. If the fairy be actively moving it does not matter much, but if motionless and aware of being gazed at then the nature-spirit will usually withdraw and apparently vanish. With fairy lovers the habit of looking at first a little sideways is common."


#5. Fairies and Their Sun-Bath. Taken August 1920. Camera: Cameo Quarter. "This is especially remarkable as it contains a feature quite unknown to the girls. The sheath or cocoon appearing in the middle of the grasses had not been seen by them before, and they had no idea what it was. Fairy observers of Scotland and the New Forest, however, were familiar with it and described it as a magnetic bath, woven very quickly by the fairies and used after dull weather, in the autumn especially. The interior seems to be magnetised in some manner that stimulates and pleases."



Skeptics noticed many problems with the photos, in addition to the obvious one that the fairies look like bits of paper. For instance, in the first photo why is Frances not looking at the fairies? (The girls claimed they were so used to the fairies that they often paid them no attention.) And why does the second fairy from the left not have wings? In the second photo, why is Elsie's hand bizarrely elongated? (Frances attributed this to "camera slant.") In the fourth photo, why is the fairy dressed in the latest French fashions?

Despite these problems, the photos continued to attract believers. Much of this belief might be attributed to the context of the times. By the end of World War One the English were emotionally bruised and battered by four years of unrelenting bloodshed. They seemed to be in need of something that would reaffirm their belief in goodness and innocence. They found this reaffirmation in the fairy photographs of Frances and Elsie.


It was not until 1978 that James Randi pointed out that the fairies in the pictures were very similar to figures in a children's book called Princess Mary's Gift Book, which had been published in 1915 shortly before the girls took the photographs.

Subsequently, in 1981, Elsie Wright confessed to Joe Cooper, who interviewed her for The Unexplained magazine, that the fairies were, in fact, paper cutouts. She explained that she had sketched the fairies using Princess Mary's Gift Book as inspiration. She had then made paper cutouts from these sketches, which she held in place with hatpins. In the second photo (of Elsie and the gnome) the tip of a hatpin can actually be seen in the middle of the creature. Doyle had seen this dot, but interpreted it as the creature's belly button, leading him to argue that fairies give birth just like humans!

Below is a side-by-side comparison of the figures in Princess Mary's Gift Book and the fairies in the first Cottingley fairy photo.



The copyright status of the Cottingley fairy photos is contested. The Science and Society Picture Library, claiming to represent the photographers' estate, has asserted exclusive right to license the use of the images. In May 2005 it sent infringement notices to many sites (including the Museum of Hoaxes) that were displaying the photos. It demanded fees of up to 130.00 GBP per year for the right to display each image.

The Museum of Hoaxes believes the Cottingley images to be in the public domain, and therefore did not remove the photos, nor has it agreed to pay a licensing fee for their use. The basis of our belief is that the images were published before 1923 in America. Specifically, they appeared in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922 by George H. Doran Co., New York. According to American law, all works published in this country before 1923 are in the public domain.

The status of the Cottingley images under British law is less clear cut, since British law grants continuing copyright to photographs taken before January 1, 1945 if the copyright has been revived. It is not clear whether or not the copyright to the Cottingley Fairy images was revived.

The possibly conflicting status of the Cottingley images under American and British law places them in an ambiguous legal situation. It is not clear which countries copyright law has priority. A possible precedent can be found in the case of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which is copyrighted in the UK, but is in the public domain in the US. Efforts to enforce the UK copyrights in America have been unsuccessful. When Project Gutenberg made the text of Peter Pan freely available on its site, it simply added a disclaimer noting that the text was public domain in the U.S., but not elsewhere.

Whether or not the Cottingley images are copyrighted, a strong case can be made that their use by sites such as the Museum of Hoaxes is protected by fair use laws — referred to as "fair dealing" laws in Great Britain — since they are displayed for the purpose of comment and criticism.

Leon Trotsky was a leader of the Russian October Revolution, second in command to Lenin. During the 1920s he opposed the policies of Stalin. As a consequence, he was deported and eventually assassinated.

When historian David King visited Moscow in 1970, he discovered that the Soviets had made a systematic attempt to purge all mention of Trotsky -- as well as any other person who had fallen out of political favor -- from historical records. This included removing Trotsky's image from photographs. King decided to start collecting examples of the Soviet falsification of photographs. In 1997 he published a book based on his collection, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia.

The top image, from King's collection, was taken by L.Y. Leonidov on November 7, 1919. It shows Soviet party leaders celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution in Red Square. Trotsky (wearing a hat and saluting) is standing near the center of the image to Lenin's left.

In 1967 a doctored version of the photo (bottom) was included in an exhibition in Moscow. Trotsky had disappeared from it. Also gone were L.B. Kamenev (who was to Lenin's immediate left) and A.B. Khalatov (the bearded man who was standing in front of the child and Trotsky).