'Francis Hetling' is a fictitious British pioneer of early Victorian photography, under whose name artist Graham Ovenden and photographer Howard Grey created images in the style of 19th-century photography. Some of these photographs were included in a 1974 exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery and some images were sold.
In 1980, Ovenden and Grey were prosecuted on charges of conspiracy. The trial revealed that both were involved in the appearance of the Hetling photographs. Grey was responsible for the technical side of creating the photographs, while Ovenden gave them the appearance of early Victorian calotypes. Ovenden stated in court that the purpose was not to obtain a large sum of money, but to show the true calibre of those in the art business, who declare themselves experts without knowing anything, and those who profit by converting aesthetic values into financial values. Grey and Ovenden were acquitted by a jury. The trial was reported in the British media and has been analysed in academic and popular works on art forgery.
During the trial, the press reported that mothers of the models had expressed dissatisfaction with the way they had been posed by Grey during the photo shoot. In 2013, Ovenden was found guilty of charges of indecency with a child and a charge of indecent assault against a child.
Hetling's photographs in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition
In July 1974, the National Portrait Gallery in London held an exhibition titled The Camera and Dr Barnardo.Francis Hetling’s Victorian Waifs. The Museum of Hoaxes, San Diego, California. The exhibition at the NPG's Carlton House Terrace siteIn 1971 the National Portrait Gallery, whose main site is by Trafalgar Square, took over the lower part of 13-15, Carlton House Terrace, using the space as storage and for temporary exhibitions from 1974 to 1980. mostly consisted of photographs of orphans from Dr Barnardo's Homes, orphanages for street children. A total of 59,384 children passed through these orphanages from the time Thomas John Barnardo founded his first orphanage in 1867 until his death in 1905, and another 250,000 children were helped by him. Around 1870, Barnardo hired a professional photographer to take pictures of every child admitted to his orphanages. The photographs were kept in the orphanage albums and in the child's medical history. The National Portrait Gallery selected about 3,000 for the exhibition of the approximately 55,000 images taken between 1870 and 1905. The exhibition also included other examples of documentary photographs made in the same period, including the work of Thomas Annan and John Thomson; these were intended to provide a context for the fight against poverty in the Victorian era. Due to the large number of photographs presented in the exhibition, the organisers did not publish a full catalogue, only a 40-page booklet containing two articles and several photographs representing different sections of the exhibition.
Seven photographs of Victorian street children taken by the previously unknown photographer Francis Hetling were exhibited. They showed eleven-year-old girls dressed in rags and photographed, as the newspapers put it, "under the railway arches at King's Cross".Marie-Anne and Mace Wenninger, in their book Secrets of [Art] Buying. Photography, published in 1992, claimed that Hetling's photographs depicted Victorian prostitutes.
Joe Nickell, a professor at the University of Kentucky, argued in his book Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation, that for every photograph from Hetling's remarkable series of images of street children and underage prostitutes in Victorian London in the exhibition, there were some of the photographer's "alleged 'diary' captions". In fact, the owner, artist and expert on Victorian photography Graham Ovenden submitted the images to the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, telling their representatives that Francis Hetling had photographed "poor Victorian street children in the north of England". The names Ovenden gave them were allegedly taken from Hetling's diaries, which he claimed to have seen in person. Esther Inglis-Arkell, in an article on the Gizmodo website, reconstructed the photographer's activities somewhat differently: Hetling was an amateur photographer and kept a personal journal while shooting. He travelled around London photographing orphans at Barnardo's orphanages. She found that although street children were fashionable subjects for photographs in the second half of the 19th century, Victorian Britons liked staged images of street children. Often, children from wealthy families were dressed in fake rags by photographers and photographed in the countryside.Inglis-Arkell E. "The chemistry of fraudulent photographs". Gizmodo (20 April 2015).
Exhibition organisers claimed that Hetling's photographs dated back to the 1840s. These photographs caused a stir among collectors because most images from this early period in the history of photography depicted members of the wealthy classes. Images of the urban poor were virtually unknown in these early years. Hetling's photographs, on the other hand, seemed to depict the poverty and squalor of street children in the early Victorian era. They looked old and were made in brown tones, like other photographs of the time made using the then-popular process of calotype (the earliest process of negative printing on paper, popular from 1840 to 1851). Despite claims that these photographs were over a hundred years old, the paper had survived remarkably well. Art critics have noted realism and immediacy in Hetling's photographs, and a sophistication of vision that few thought possible at so early a date. Art historian Valerie Lloyd of the National Portrait Gallery also admired the photographs, but viewed them with suspicion.
In 1975, in his book The Invented Eye: Masterpieces of Photography 1839–1914, English art critic and photographic historian Edward Lucie-Smith ranked Hetling's work among the finest of the pre-World War I period and even included a brief profile of the Victorian master:
Francis Hetling (b. 1799 – d.?). Hetling made his first photographs in 1844. His work has been carefully catalogued and indexed since 1846. He used primarily, but not exclusively, the calotype process.
Disclosure
Disclosure versions and forgers' identities In 1978, a scandal erupted. In November of that year, the British newspaper The Sunday Times published an article by its columnist Magnus Linklater in connection with the four-year-old exhibition. In December of the same year, it was reprinted in full by the American newspaper The Washington Post. As it turned out, even then a woman recognised a child she knew in one of the photographs on display, allegedly taken by Hetling in the 19th century. The author of an article in the 16-volume The Encyclopedia of Collectibles, Harvey Zucker, stated that "the so-called waif was recognised by a friend of her mother's as a living 11-year-old from the suburbs". There are articles in which the author tries to avoid specificity in describing the event: "someone recognised the young girl who had been the model". In contrast, the Daily Mirror of 20 November 1978 gave the name of the identified girl and where she lived — Joanna Sheffield from Twickenham and used her photograph on its front page. It noted that the children in Hetling's photographs were shown in erotic poses. The photographs of Sheffield dressed in rags were taken when she was only eleven years old.The same name was mentioned by the Washington Post and much later in the story of the identification of the child in the photograph (in his version, the daughter of a friend of the visitor's friend) by Joe Nickell. He added that the girl was a professional model at a young age. Paul Craddock confirmed the age and professionalism of the young model. The English barrister, playwright, screenwriter and author John Mortimer told the story in a slightly different version and in relation to a different photograph. According to him, the mother herself visited the National Portrait Gallery, and she recognised in the standing dirty, barefoot and trembling on the doorway of a Victorian slum house child her own daughter, whom she had taken to school that morning in Battersea. Art historian Paul Crane recognised this model as a visitor to the exhibition. Art historian Paul Craddock wrote, that some visitors to the exhibition recognised the model, while others found the photographs "'wrong': the lighting and tonality were unconvincing, and the faces looked 'modern'." The visitor(s) did not inform the exhibition organisers that they had identified children they knew in the photographs on display. The Times reported that three mothers of the models expressed dissatisfaction with the way the children posed for Grey during the photo shoot.
It was later revealed that Hetling's work, and Hetling himself, were an elaborate and successful hoax made by two friends: the artist Graham Ovenden and the photographer Howard Grey. Grey had become noted for a portfolio of images of the last arrival of West Indian migrants at London's Waterloo Station before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came into force in 1962. Since 1963, Grey was involved in various fashion and television advertising projects.Grey, Howard. Bridgeman Images.
By 1974 Ovenden had become known for his pictorial portraits of young girls, and from the 1950s (while still in his teens) he began to create and publish his own photographs on the subject. In 1973, Ovenden published a book on the work of two pioneers of Scottish photography, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. He was one of the first art historians to draw attention to the work of Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden. In 1974, Ovenden dedicated a book to her, published simultaneously in London and New York. Other books published by Ovenden in 1974 included Victorian Children (co-authored with Robert Melville, 1972). During this period, Ovenden was active in group exhibitions, including Alice at the Victor Waddington Gallery in London (1970). He also showed his work in solo exhibitions, including the Piccadilly Gallery in London, where he exhibited regularly from 1970.
The end of the hoax was described by Dino Brugioni, intelligence analyst and former chief of information for the U.S. CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, in a 1999 book on photographic forgery. He claimed that the forgery was confirmed by detailed paper analysis of the photographs. It was from the story of Francis Hetling's exposé that Brugioni formulated his seven principles for analysing photographic paper.