Fakery- The Hoax archive

website

While looking for famous faked images i came across this website, the hoax archive, which works as a data base for famous hoax images and faked photos.
I thought it would be good to explore the images through the years in a comparison and this allows me to see some of the greats in such an easy way, as well as exposing my knowlage to new images and hoaxs. While alot of the images show mytical creatures, edited images with things added or removed as there is such a vastamount i will be focusing on just images that are charactorised as spiritual.

First faked image

The first recorded event of a staged photo was of M. Bayard who was said to be in the race for creating the first photographic image in the 1830's. After loosing to be the first, he decided to photograph how he felt about coming second and with the use of a staged photo, and added caption:

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. "As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay."
He had created the first faked image. This really does just go to show how text can influence imagery. 

First faked spirit photo

The first spirit 'faked' image was in 1861 by a photographer and etchist named Mumler. One day, after developing a self-portrait, he noticed what appeared to be the shadowy figure of a young girl floating beside his own likeness. Mumler assumed it was an accident, the trace of an earlier negative made with the same plate, but friends told him the figure resembled his dead cousin. Soon the unusual photo (top) came to the attention of the spiritualist community, who proclaimed it to be the first photo ever taken of a spirit. Mumler didn't argue with them. Instead he took advantage of the interest in the photo to go into business as the world's first spirit photographer. He grew wealthy producing spirit photos for grief-stricken clients who had lost relatives in the Civil War. Ironically it was not him who originally insisted that the image was real, but others. Instead he just decided to go along with others said and made himself rich in the process.

This was basically a very early form of double exposure. which myself is something that ive experimented in with my work.

Armistice day spirit hoax

Ada Emma Deane spent most of her life working as a cleaning lady before launching a new career as a photographic medium at the age of 58. She quickly became one of the most famous mediums in Britain. Her signature effect was that eerie, disembodied heads would appear in pictures taken by her. These heads, so it was claimed, were the manifestation of departed spiritsDeane's most famous photos were those she took, with the help of spiritualist Estelle Stead, during the two minutes silence at services commemorating Armistice Day and the end of World War I. In these photos ghostly figures and faces — supposedly the spirits of dead war heroes — could be seen floating above the crowd. The photos of armistice day became famous and widely anticipated to the point where news papers out bid each other for the rights to print. But two days later The Daily Sketch paper, announced it had discovered the photo to be a fraud. The faces in the cloud were not dead war heroes. Instead, they appeared to be living football players and boxers. The paper published portraits of the athletes alongside Deane's spirit photo.Below are two different Armistice day images taken by Ade Deane

The Brown Lady

This is one of the most famous ghost photos of all time. It supposedly shows the "Brown Lady" who haunts Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. The image was taken by Captain Provand and Indre Shira (a pseudonym), two photographers on assignment for Country Life magazine. According to their later testimony, the pair saw an ethereal form descending the staircase and quickly snapped a picture. Skeptics argue that the photo does not show a ghost, but rather was the result of mundane causes such as camera vibration, afternoon light from the window above the stairs catching the lens of the camera, and double exposure. What is not known is whether these effects were produced purposefully, or if they were the accidental result of a faulty camera.