Long before AI or Photoshop, manipulated images were already widespread. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is showing “Fake! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages” until May 25, an exhibition that highlights how photographic tricks and fakes date back to photography’s earliest days.
Curator Hans Rooseboom notes that ever since photography began roughly 187 years ago, images have been altered for many reasons — sometimes harmful, sometimes purely for amusement. The show gathers 50 historical items from the museum’s collection, originally published as postcards, magazine covers and posters, demonstrating a range of manipulation techniques.
Early experiments like multiple exposure allowed photographers to depict the same person twice in one frame by exposing different parts of a plate in separate steps. Other works were made by combining parts of negatives to produce surreal effects — for example, a circa 1900–1910 photomontage of a man pushing a wheelbarrow carrying an oversized head. Humorous and fantastical images, including a 1908 postcard of men taking giant geese to market, show that manipulated pictures were popular entertainment long before digital tools.
Manipulations served varied purposes. Some were political or commercial, but many catered to a large market for amusement — a predecessor to today’s memes and viral visual content. At the same time, staged photography was used deliberately as propaganda. In the 1870s, Parisian brothers Eugène and Ernest Appert produced a series titled “Crimes of the Commune,” staging scenes with actors and combining headshots to vilify participants in the Paris uprisings; authorities later banned the images for inflaming anti-Communard sentiment.
Photomontage also became a pointed medium for political satire. German artist Helmut Herzfeld, who published as John Heartfield, used collage to attack Nazism and fascism. From 1930, Heartfield supplied covers for the communist weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ). One striking cover shows Joseph Goebbels seemingly fitting Karl Marx’s beard onto Adolf Hitler, mocking propaganda efforts to appeal to workers. Rooseboom emphasizes that such works were intended as satire and were clearly read that way by contemporary audiences.
The context of media distribution mattered: by the 1930s mass-circulation magazines could reach millions, giving manipulated images a broad platform. Yet reception in the late 19th and early 20th centuries remains only partially documented. Rooseboom points out a key difference with today: a person now encounters, in a single day, more images than a 19th-century person might see in a lifetime. That overload encourages rapid scrolling and surface-level viewing, which can make it easier to miss clues that reveal modern AI-generated fakes.
Edited by: Cristina Burack