Absent

In Absent I have ‘corrected’ three famous photographic hoaxes. The original photographs themselves were not strictly speaking unreal - it was the stories that circulated with the images that were untrue. Everything in the picture was in front of the camera and captured without double exposures, combination printing, retouching or other tricks. The fairies, monster and alien were simple props. In Absent I have chosen to digitally remove these props, in an effort to restore reality within the images. It is an attempt to make a manipulated image that is more real than its ‘straight’ original.

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In 1917 the cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took their first photograph of fairies. They were 16 and 10 years old. The girls’ parents had not believed Frances when she told them about the fairies she’d seen. Elsie, who had attended Bradford Art College and had also worked in a photographic studio where they retouched photographs of dead soldiers, suggested they borrow her father’s camera to prove that Frances was telling the truth. They initially took two pictures; three more were taken in 1920. The negatives and prints were analysed by the photographic expert Harold Snelling, who authenticated them and also ‘sharpened’ and ‘cleaned up’ the original overexposed fairies. The images made it to publication in The Strand in 1920 with a text by Arthur Conan Doyle (whose grandfather was in a psychiatric hospital and also claimed to see fairies). He genuinely believed in the validity of the photographs and wrote The Coming of the Fairies in 1922.

In 1983, Frances and Elsie confessed that the fairies were actually drawings made by Elsie and stuck in the ground with hatpins. The drawings were inspired by illustrations in ‘Princess Mary’s Gift Book’ from 1914, a collection of stories that Arthur Conan Doyle had, incidentally, also contributed to. Frances died in 1986 and always maintained that she had seen fairies, and believed that one of the photographs was ‘real’. She stopped seeing fairies in 1921. ‘Frances and the Fairies’ is displayed on her tombstone.

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In 1933, when a new road was built just north of Loch Ness, the press started reporting numerous sightings of the legendary Loch Ness monster. The Daily Mail hired Marmaduke Wetherell, an actor, filmmaker and big game hunter, to find the monster. In December 1933, he reported that he had found the monster’s footprints. The National History Museum examined the tracks, and found that they had been printed from an umbrella stand made from a rhinoceros foot. It is not clear by whom the tracks were made.  In April 1934, a photograph of the monster was allegedly taken by Colonel Robert Wilson, a Harley Street gynaecologist. Wilson never wanted to have his name associated with the photograph and it simply became known as “The Surgeon’s Photo” after it was published by the Daily Mail.

In 1994, shortly before his death, Christian Spurling, Wetherell’s son-in-law, revealed that the photograph was a hoax. The hoax was set up by Wetherell, whose son Ian took the actual photograph. Wetherell asked Spurling, a sculptor and model maker, to make the sea monster, which was then photographed. The monster was less than half a metre long. Robert Wilson was drafted in as the front, a credible eyewitness.

Some believers in the Loch Ness monster still attempt to discredit allegations that the photograph is a hoax and believe that the real hoax is Spurling’s story.

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The ‘alien autopsy’ film footage was screened in a press conference at The Museum of London by Ray Santilli, a film producer, in 1995. Santilli claimed that the film showed the top-secret military autopsy of an alien found in a crashed spacecraft near Roswell in 1947. The film was allegedly bought from a retired US military cameraman, who had managed to keep hold of some of the film reels.

In 2006 Santilli confessed that only some of the footage (less than 5%) was real. He claimed that the footage released in 1995 was a reconstruction of the original film, which he said he had viewed in 1992. He said that at the time he had not been able to buy the footage from the cameraman, and that by the time he could, it had deteriorated. The film of the reconstructed autopsy, based on Santilli’s memory of the original footage, is supposed to include some of the original 1947 film.

The alien corpse featured in the film was made by the sculptor and special effects prop maker John Humphries. The ‘autopsy’ was shot in Camden, north London, and afterwards the alien body was cut to pieces and disposed of in bins all over London.