Picture This ; He's Famously Photographed Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. But What Happened When Rankin Went Away with the Fairies?

Summary

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Photographing fairies always involves exaggeration and sleight of hand. Take the legendary Cottingley fairies, for instance. In 1917, two girls, Elsie Wright, 16, and her ten-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, claimed to have captured images of themselves playing with tiny winged creatures at the bottom of a West Yorkshire garden. Only many decades later did they admit that the photographs were faked and involved cut-out drawings of fairy figures that were fastened to foliage with hatpins.

Now, trendy London photographer Rankin always known only as Rankin has released his version of the Cottingley fairy photographs. And again, some exaggeration and sleight of hand are involved. Not that he's in any way claiming they are real. No, it's all far more 21st century than that, this time involving a mobile- phone company, several dozen public-relations consultants and lashings of irony.

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Extract

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Picture This ; He's Famously Photographed Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. But What Happened When Rankin Went Away with the Fairies?

With its latest camera phone, the new megapixel 7610 to promote, Nokia came up with the idea some 18 months ago of giving Rankin pots of money and telling him to photograph whatever he wanted.

At the time, Rankin's then six-and-a-half-year-old son, ...

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