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left of the dog there’s clearly another figure who wasn’t visible when the photo was taken. And it is remarkable in that it was smaller than the 4-year-old Suzie, had pointed ears, cloven hooves, slanted eyes - all the hall-marks of the kind of creature visualised and illustrated by many painters and children’s illustrators over the previous 150 years or so, and called fairies. And her dog’s hackles were visibly raised. By this time, at Art School, I had already done some basic darkroom practice, was familiar with photo-montage (but not yet with the Cottingly Fairies), and her photo looked otherwise ordinary - they had made no attempt to draw public attention to this unusual snap-shot, considering it a specially private image.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Mon frère Zissou en Fantôme 1904-5.
15 years earlier the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, aged just ten, had taken two photographs of his brother Zissou lieing on a garden seat, and secondly draped in gauze, playing a spirit, and double exposed the two negs to create his spoof spirit photo.