Many of us will have seen the images of the Cottingley Fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917.  Of course in the end Elsie admitted they were fake in the early 1980’s confessing they where cardboard cut outs, all the same amazing and legendary photography especially considering they where taken only 16 years after the invention of the Eastman Kodak Box Brownie!

Time and technology move on, and what with the popularity of Photoshop and the like, images can so easily be manipulated without the need for cardboard and glue.  We’ve all become a little more sceptical about the truth of the image, and what with me having a background in photography and of course experience of Photoshop since version 1 (some 20+ years ago – how long ago!!!) I especially so.

All that said I’ve always said to my two girls keep an open mind about everything, God, Father Christmas, Fairies, Ghosts etc … I can’t prove or disprove theses concepts, who really knows, just respect peoples beliefs and believe what works for you.  I once explained to my youngest daughter that perhaps fairies push seedlings from underground in the Spring and that maybe fairies work for Father Christmas and have a month off in January after the rush, and come back to Mother Nature work to start Spring.  Also I said maybe fairies are born from the electrical impulses of us when we die, who really knows.

So with this creative vision in my mind of how things could be I viewed the pictures taken by John Hyatt, (Director of Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design) with some interest and I have to say warmth as they are beautiful.

The pictures first released on Social Media eventually appeared in the ‘commercial press’ on the 2nd April in the Manchester Evening news.  

John is on a personal mission to get more adults to believe and ‘bring a bit of magic into their lives.’  He claims they are untouched digitally and stated that he snapped images of what he claims are the tiny winged creatures whilst out photographing the Lancashire landscape over the last two years.  He goes on to state that he went out again to take pictures of flies and gnats but they looked totally different.

The images called Rossendale Fairies, will be on show at The Whitaker Museum in Whitaker Park in Rossendale, throughout the spring.

Take from this what you wish, but in part I’m with John on this one, at very least they are beautiful and enchanting images.  If they open peoples minds a little bit, let a little bit of magic into peoples imaginations away from the binary world that we live in, who knows the magic of the fairies may very well add a little bit of magic to our lives.

It never hurts to dream, imagine and believe, just as we once did when we were children 🙂

Read the full article on the MEN Website here