I Still Believe in Fairies

As a girl, I used to believe the tree in front of my house was a fairy-house because it had this tiny little nook with acorns in it.

Although it was probably a squirrel's nest, I liked thinking that, like in that movie "Fairy Tales: A True Story", I would get to meet some magic fairies.

Unfortunately, that movie isn't true. It was based on these two cousins who, between 1917-1920s, took photos with "fairies" and convinced their small community that they had actually met the magic-folk. The photos were analyzed and discovered to be fakes, but it wasn't until the 1980s that the girls confessed that they had indeed used paper fairies and posed with them.

Above are two of the five original photos, with the eldest posing with several types of fairies. I tried to capture the sunlight of a magic fairy forest with overlaying shades of yellow, sort of like sun glint.

Hopefully the colors of the fairies are restored to the colors the girls intended -- it's hard to gage what colors an imaginative girl would want her fairies to be. But this much is true: you don't have to believe in fairies to find the magic in these photographs.