laphamsquarterly:

For all his scientific flair, photography was one innovation Holmes never relied on. “As a rule,” Holmes tells Watson in “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,” “when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory.” Indeed, we tend to imagine Holmes as a camera in his own right, lensed with a magnifying glass, able to retain trace data (“trifles,” as he calls them) for cross-reference in some mental databank. He knows the eye can play tricks, and that witnesses can distort the facts of an otherwise rigorous investigation.”

-Miles Klee on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingly Faeries

Holmes isn’t wrong, you know.