Research source

The lighting of the fairies is badly wrong; they are brightly illuminated from a point behind the camera,…

Date of account: Published 1923
Source: The Case Against Spirit Photographs
Reference: The Case Against Spirit Photographs · selected passage 61
Rights: public_domain
Language: English
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

The lighting of the fairies is badly wrong; they are brightly illuminated from a point behind the camera, whereas Alice is less brightly illuminated, and from the left-hand side

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

The lighting of the fairies is badly wrong; they are brightly illuminated from a point behind the camera, whereas Alice is less brightly illuminated, and from the left-hand side. Sir Arthur, in his article, points out that this is accounted for by the “fairy psychoplasm” having a “faint luminosity of its own.” To appear brighter than the sitter, photographed by 1/50th of a second exposure at three o’clock on a sunny July afternoon, the fairies would have to resemble in luminosity a battery of arc lights! The photograph appears to have been produced by pasting the “fairies” on to an enlargement of the original photograph of Alice, and then re-photographing the whole. The fairies could be obtained by taking posed photographs of children suitably dressed; these would then be carefully cut out from their backgrounds and pasted on to the original enlargement.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This source supplies historical scientific, skeptical or conventional context. Its terminology and conclusions may not reflect current scholarship.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice uses this as an alternative-explanation source, not as an automatic dismissal of testimony. Claims still need to be compared with the actual evidence and current knowledge.

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