Power at play in paranormal history
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Power_at_Play_-_SMGJ.pdf
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93.11 MB
Format
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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Ferguson, Christine
Date published
December 19, 2024
Abstract
This article presents a collective object biography and discussion of the Cottingley Fairy artefacts – cameras, photographs, watercolour sketches and print materials – held at the National Science and Media Museum. I demonstrate how the controversial paranormal claims made about the Cottingley cameras by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner relied on the manipulation and obfuscation of key episodes in their history of use, a strategy that worked to distance the objects from each other and from their young female working-class operators Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright. My article seeks to both interlink and restore the lost episodes in the histories of these objects as a way of redressing the power imbalance between the plebeian producers and elite cosmopolitan popularisers of the world-famous fairy photographs. I suggest how a new curatorial approach to the materials might reject the familiar – and largely inaccurate – narrative of deliberate hoax and deception still widely attached to the case, and instead use them to tell a new story about the technological experimentation, artistic aspirations and social restrictions experienced by working-class girls in early twentieth-century Britain.
Journal title
Science Museum Group Journal
Issue
22
Publisher
The Science Museum
Place of publication
London
ISSN
2054-5770
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Rights statement
In Copyright
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