When I first started assembling the photographics that have become The Pearly Gates Archive almost 15 years ago, I would often wonder about what someone from the future might think should they run across one of them 500 years from now, especially if it were found unintentionally and undocumented, say, in a time capsule or in an old, abandoned bomb shelter.
That said, initially I was, also, fascinated by how the objects that clutter our lives, like, for example, vernacular photographs, serve to define and reinforce how we come to view ourselves and the world around us, for better, or for worse, as illustrated in the story of the discovery and exploitation of the Cardiff Giant (a summary of which follows) occurring in the latter half of the 19th century.
In this particular example, to bastardize a line from Paul Simon, it’s clear that we, as a species, have always seen and heard what we’ve wanted to see and hear – and, then, disregarded the rest.
THE CARDIFF GIANT
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
~ Abraham Lincoln
In life you have to rely on the past, and that’s called history.
~ Donald J. Trump
In Cardiff, New York, in 1869, two men digging a well on a local farm uncovered a ten foot tall man, either petrified or carved from stone, depending on one's interpretation of its origins at the time. It became known as the Cardiff Giant, and over the course of the next few years, tens of thousands of paying customers would make pilgrimage to view it and conjure up in their own minds some miraculous, or not so miraculous, reason for it to be.
Additionally, hundreds of thousands across the country would read about the find in the newspapers and magazines of the day. Only a spare minority of those in the know, however, would come to believe the Cardiff Giant to be a hoax.
And yet hoax the statue was, perpetrated by a local swindler named George Hull, intent on securing his place in history and on amassing a personal fortune in the process. A year earlier, he had engaged a Chicago stonemason to carve the statue according to his specifications, after which he had had it transported to Cardiff and discreetly buried on the property of a relative, left there to weather in the soil.
Following its “discovery” a year later, Hull would sell the statue for $30,000 to a consortium of businessmen in Syracuse, New York, he having persuaded them that it really was a petrified giant from biblical times.
By the following year, P.T. Barnum, knowing a good grift when he saw it, had reproduced the statue in plaster and was displaying it in New York City, claiming it to be the original and declaring the Cardiff Giant on exhibit in Syracuse to be a counterfeit.
The Syracuse business consortium, whose members had purchased the original from George Hull, then filed a lawsuit claiming Barnum was defaming both their integrity and the authenticity of the likeness in their possession. Testimony in court, however, would reveal both versions of the Cardiff Giant to be fabrications, compelling the presiding judge to throw out the defamation claim filed against Barnum, ruling that legal proceedings couldn’t be brought against someone for making a fake of a fake, or for calling a fake a fake.
For several years thereafter, both versions of the Cardiff Giant continued to be displayed to enormous crowds, the pilgrims in attendance conveniently ignoring any evidence that might substantiate the fakes’ fraudulent origins. These beguiled folks, for whatever reasons, chose to accept the incredible over the mundane, to believe that there had once existed an idyllic, mythical time when men had been men and giants had roamed the earth, placing more faith in the figments of their imaginations than in their discernment of the crudely carved truths of the matter: that the objects of their worship had been fashioned out of nothing more than profit, plaster, and stone, laid bare, once the price of admission had been paid, for one and all to see.
News from the Front: I haven’t posted here in several weeks, alas, devoting my time instead to renovating my website which is evolving into a virtual repository for all of my work, past and present. Take a look :-)
Many thanks for perusing,
peter