Long before Photoshop and AI-generated images, photographers and image makers were already altering pictures for entertainment, persuasion and profit. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted an exhibition called “Fake! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages,” on view through May 25, that showcases 50 objects from the museum’s holdings—postcards, magazine covers and posters—that reveal a wide range of pre-digital manipulation techniques.
Curator Hans Rooseboom points out that image alteration goes back to photography’s origins in the 19th century. Practitioners used mechanical and darkroom methods to achieve effects now often associated with digital tools. Some experiments played with multiple exposures so a subject could appear twice in one frame by exposing different parts of a plate in separate steps. Other techniques involved cutting and joining negatives to create surreal composites, producing visual jokes or uncanny scenes long before computers.
The show includes striking examples: a circa 1900–1910 photomontage of a man pushing a wheelbarrow carrying an oversized head, and a 1908 postcard depicting men taking giant geese to market. Such images were made for amusement and sold widely—the ancestors of today’s visual memes and viral pictures.
Manipulated pictures were also used for political ends. In the 1870s Parisian brothers Eugène and Ernest Appert staged scenes and combined portrait elements in a series called “Crimes of the Commune” to discredit participants in the Paris uprisings. Authorities later banned those images, arguing they inflamed anti-Communard feeling.
Photomontage became a sharp tool for satire in the 20th century. German artist Helmut Herzfeld, better known as John Heartfield, produced incisive collages attacking Nazism and fascism. Beginning in 1930 he supplied covers for the communist weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ); one memorable cover shows Joseph Goebbels apparently fitting Karl Marx’s beard onto Adolf Hitler, a visual lampoon intended to expose propaganda efforts aimed at workers. Rooseboom stresses that contemporary readers understood these works as satire.
The means of distribution shaped impact. By the 1930s, mass-circulation magazines could put manipulated images in front of millions, amplifying their reach. But the record of how people reacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is incomplete, and interpretations have to be cautious.
Rooseboom draws a contrast with today’s media environment: a modern person encounters far more images in a single day than a 19th-century person might have seen in a lifetime. That volume encourages quick, surface-level viewing—scrolling past details that might otherwise reveal a fake—so contemporary image overload creates new challenges for detecting deception, even as the techniques themselves have antecedents going back to photography’s early days.
Edited by: Cristina Burack