Pomegranate Press ~ Texas
(Diana Dopson)

Fairyland
By Diana Dopson
2004. Edition of 75.

8.5 x 5.75" in blue wraps. Contains full-color, archival prints from photographer Diana Dopson. Text letter press printed. Designed by Diana Dopson. Printed by Bradley Hutchinson.

In 1917, two young girls in Cottingley, England, took photographs of fairies they routinely encountered along a brook near their cottage. They wanted to prove to their disbelieving parents that the fairies did, in fact, exist. Soon, experts scrutinized the prints and negatives, and the respected Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pronounced the photographs genuine. He published an article in 1920 corroborating the girls' claim, supporting his conclusion with the latest photographic science and with the testimony of expert witnesses. Doyle even felt that the discovery of the fairies might help heal a generation recovering from war - that the "recognition of (the fairies') existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life."

And so began a fairy craze, the latest installation in millennia-old fairy lore gathered since Homer first mentioned the fantastical creatures in the Iliad. Many years later, the two women - then in their eighties - confessed that the photos were staged. But they continued to insist that the images were accurate simulations of the fairies they played with everyday.

Dopson's photographic series "Fairyland" is a collection of landscapes from the point of view of an insect or fairy, something tiny.

This book uses those images to suggest those physical areas in which our eye may see nothing, but which are in fact teeming with matter. It all depends on our lens. Who is to say that with a different lens we might not see fairies?
$95