A collaborative project by Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley.
The Naked Truth combines traditional, manipulated, and performative photographs with a historical archive to resurrect this Great Depression-era story: a Victorian health spa in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, turned into a fake hospital by a traveling con man.
Norman Baker sold cancer cures out of a haunted Ozark hotel. He wasn't a doctor.
Baker started as a vaudeville mesmerist. He later used the same tricks of spectacle and illusion to sell himself as a healer. His trademark treatment, Formula 5, did not work.
Desperation always leaves an opening for someone willing to walk through it. Eureka Springs was built on the promise of magical healing, and in the depths of the Depression, Baker gave the town something to believe in.
Dolezal and Shipley see the same pattern today: economic instability, political discourse built on convenient lies, a hunger for easy answers to hard problems.
The Naked Truth sits on the line between reality and illusion, the line where wonder turns into exploit. In one small corner of America's past, it finds a mirror for the wonder, trauma, and strangeness still running through the country now.
