Very likely a doctored photo but cool nonetheless. Some other nice vids and pics there also - including a particularly terrific photo of Jeff squaring up to Ed Dunkhorst - plus some others of Jeff and Ed.
Next thing you know, someone will try to convince us that young George Foreman could tote around a cow over his shoulders or old man Foreman could pull a pickup truck across his back yard with a rope.
I'm sure that the picture was intended to illustrate Jeffries' immense strength, which has been abundantly documented, but it's hardly real for all that. I can't imagine the two men balancing on a ball in that fashion, were it on the ground, let alone being hoisted in the air like this, and the hoisting itself seems out of the question. Even Sandow, the prototypical strongman of the time never did anything remotely like that. But the manipulation of images is as old as photography. When spiritual science was in vogue around the turn of the last century, numerous pictures were produced from seances that were quite persuasive, of ghostly apparitions, horns or other objects balanced on streams of "ectoplasm" or the the same issuing from the mouths of the mediums. Houdini made a second career exposing such frauds. One he desisted from concerned Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed that pictures produced by two little English girls of fairies cavorting with them were genuine and proof of the existence of the wee folk. Much later it was revealed that the girls had cut the images out of a children's picture book. So, the photographs were genuine in the sense that they were of something, though not what they were purportedly of. The fraud was obvious enough, but Doyle was a good friend of the magician, who preferred to allow the older man to indulge himself in such a fantasy.
Great post. Re the question of doctored photos, the photo that conned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of all people) immediately came to my mind also. Just goes to prove, when you are strongly predisposed to believing something and truly want to believe something, how much it can corrupt otherwise objective and critical thinking. I guess due to photography being in its relatively rudimentary stages - though still somewhat advanced - we can cut Doyle some slack. It is also rumoured that Doyle took cocaine - so that might’ve impaired his judgement a lil bit, lol. Doyle’s iconic literary character Sherlock Holmes was portrayed as indulging in opium, right? Perhaps a not so subtle projection on Doyle’s part? I guess most know that Doyle was invited to ref the Johnson vs Jeffries fight but declined. He had better things to do, like chasing fairies. Haha. [url]https://www.instagram.com/eldritch_oculum_antiquarian/p/DBKINgXTjoR/[/url]
