FOR the next few months Bradford will be home to the fossilised remains of a mermaid.

The life-size fossil lies in a glass case at the National Media Museum, along with a stuffed goat with wings and photographs of newly-discovered galaxies and monks performing miracles.

The exhibition, by Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta, has to be seen to be believed – although he'd rather you didn't believe any of it.

The internationally renowned photographer investigates the truth and reliability of photography, challenging us to question what we see. "When we see a photograph we tend to believe it is true," he said. "We accept the authority of a photograph, and a museum setting adds authority.

"My work includes clues which act like a seed in the viewer's mind. You want to believe what you see, but something makes you doubt it."

The exhibition, Stranger Than Fiction, gathers 30 years of Mr Fontcuberta's work challenging disciplines such as photography, science and religion. Six of his projects are at the National Media Museum until February 5 and include photographs of bizarre creatures such as a snake with legs, a goat/baboon hybrid, and a tree-dwelling duck. His striking images of new star systems, paying homage to the cosmos, are inprints of dust from his windscreen, and his mermaid fossils are made from skeleton casts and dolphin bones.

Mr Fontcuberta's attempts to fool us through photography come a century after Bradford was at the centre of the world's first photography hoax. Between 1917 and 1920 Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright took photographs of what they claimed were fairies at Cottingley Beck. Using a hatpin and paper cut-outs, they created images that fooled the world.

The photographs came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1920, via Bradford Theosophical Society, and were scrutinised by scientists.

Sixty years later, the cousins, by then elderly women, finally admitted they were fakes.

The camera on which the original photographs were taken, and a camera given to the girls by Conan Doyle, are at the National Media Museum.