Faking It

On the afternoon of Thursday 3^rd of February we had a guest speaker to deliver a talk, Dean Loughran from the Bradford Media Museum, who is the Future Strategy Coordinator; this was an interesting talk and covered a few topics, which one part of it was on, what we think is only available to us now via digital technology, the faking of photographs; however this had been happening in the early years comparatively shortly after the birth of photography, for a more recent example were the 2 girls from Cottingley in Bradford who fooled a high percentage of the nation into thinking that there were fairies living at the bottom of their garden, taking in some high profile people, Arthur Conan Doyle for one, however we can see that this is some fairies cut out of a book and propped up, however I fell that it is easier to discredit this photograph now due to this activity happening so much more, that we disbelieve until proven otherwise. Another example is with Henry Peach Robinson in 1862, who created, though not maliciously, a fake photograph from 9 different glass plate negatives, however this was very carefully and cleverly constructed. This just goes to show that ‘faking it’ has been around longer than most would have believe. A more indepth peice on this photograph and Henry Peach Robinson work can be found on the National Media Museums website: Bringing Home The May - Henry Peach Robinson