Have photographs ever really told the truth? One hundred and fifty years before today's controversial AI chatbots and deep fakes, photographers created remarkable image manipulations. Here are 10 images from the 19th and 20th Centuries that tricked the viewer. Image manipulation has always been around.
Since the early days of Photoshop in the 1990s, developments in image fakery have seen us looking at photographs with rising suspicion. But the Rijksmuseum's latest photography exhibition asks a pertinent question: Have photographs ever told the truth?
Focusing on images taken between 1860 and 1940, Fake! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages from the Rijksmuseum Collection makes the case that image fakery is far from a recent phenomenon and, when used wisely, can even be a force for good. From collages created with scissors and glue to clever deceptions fabricated under cover of darkness in their developing rooms, photographers have always enjoyed fooling their audiences. "Image manipulation has been around as long as photography itself," the exhibition’s curator, Hans Rooseboom, tells the BBC. "It’s part of the whole history of photography."
Here are 10 images from the exhibition that tell the story of the early days of photographic trickery.
1. Daydream (c 1870–1890), anonymous
Two realities collide in this 19th-Century carte de visite that was most likely purchased to be collected and traded. Cartes de visite were small mass-produced prints mounted on card, and were very popular in the Victorian era. In this one we see the present: a woman and her partner both with the tools of their trades; and an imagined future: her daydream of becoming a mother. The image, explains Rooseboom, was "a darkroom trick", achieved by shielding part of the photographic paper from the light and then adding a second negative to it later. Such images took photography into a new dimension, suggesting the innermost thoughts of their subjects, and paving the way for the comic strips of the future with their speech bubbles and thought clouds.
2. Man startled by his own reflection (c 1870–1880), Leonard de Koningh
In this comical memento mori, where a man comes face to face with his ghost, the painter and photographer Leonard de Koningh exposed just half of the photographic plate, then had the subject adopt a different pose before exposing the other half. Photography might have been a relatively new art, but the transition between the two images is imperceptible. "It's like a magician," marvels Rooseboom. "You know you are being tricked, but you don't know how the photographer does it."
3. Decapitation (c 1880–1900), FM Hotchkiss
"We still expect photography to bring the truth, but this idea only really emerged from the illustrated magazines of the 1930s in order to inform readers how things worked elsewhere in the world," says Rooseboom. Until then, the creative freedom to alter the image was unchallenged. "Anything possible would be tried out and produced," he says. "There was no ethical restraint on producing non-realistic images. No-one would forbid you from doing this."
4. Photomontage of a man pushing a wheelbarrow containing a head (c 1900–1910), anonymous
This photomontage, created from two negatives, was found in a French photo album, and featured in the science magazine La Nature. Here, the displaced head illusion goes a step further as the photographer plays with scale, prefiguring the Surrealist movement which gathered pace as the century unrolled, disrupting conventional shapes and sizes to create confusing, dreamlike scenes.
5. Taking our Geese to market (1909), Martin Post Card Company
The trend for playing with images of impossible proportions spawned a genre known as "Exaggerations" or "Tall Tales". This US photograph was printed during the "Golden Age" of picture postcards, shortly after the US decreed that messages could be written on the address side of the card. We see again the pioneering role photo manipulation plays in artistic developments such as Surrealism, but the use of scale here is also a marketing ploy to create myths about the agricultural superiority of a region. In this case, it's the celebrated stuffed geese of Watertown, Wisconsin.
6. Car floating above Mulberry Bend Park, New York (1908), Theodor Eismann
Fake photographs activated the imagination, presenting imagined possibilities yet to come. This example of a toekomstbeeld (vision of the future) envisages a world where cars could fly. Elsewhere in the exhibition we see futuristic cityscapes: town centres transformed by sky rails and zeppelins thanks to some deft copy and pasting, and skyborne visitors floating over Boston, Hamburg and The Hague in scenes reminiscent of Mary Poppins. Eismann's New York photomontage now features colour but is no more truthful, its limited range of inks added during the printing process at the whim of the designer.
7. Advertisement for the Transfield Sisters (c 1904-1918), anonymous
As the 20th Century dawned, photography assumed a growing role in advertising, attracting attention with playful designs such as this early advert for the vaudeville act the Transfield Sisters. Photomontages used different-sized photographs, shot at a range of angles, which created, "a dynamic visual language, reflecting an era of rapid change."
8. Collision between a car and a steamroller (1915), Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr
We've come to think of photo trickery as something sinister, but in his research on its use in early photography, Rooseboom says he was surprised to find that "three-quarters of all the images were made for fun". In this photomontage by Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr, the clever placement of a series of individual − sometimes overlapping − images provides a humorous snapshot in time. The unusually dynamic, action-filled scene features flying coattails and frilly bloomers as the passengers of a car are catapulted through the air, inviting a before-and-after narrative in the mind of the viewer.
9. Photo collage (1929), Albert Huyot
The cutting up of images and rearranging them on paper with glue was once a popular pastime. People made celebrity photo quizzes, sometimes featuring just a nose or a pair of eyes; and the photographed faces of friends and family were superimposed onto drawings for comic effect. Photo collages were also undertaken by established artists. In this piece, which is influenced by Dadaism and Cubism, French artist Albert Huyot manipulates fragments of photographic images into surprising new artistic forms.
10. Mimicry (Joseph Goebbels disguising Hitler as Karl Marx to placate the workers) (1934), John Heartfield
Sometimes, in a surprising twist, photographic trickery was a tool for conveying a perceived truth. Anti-Nazi campaigner Helmut Herzfeld, who changed his name to the anglicised John Heartfield in protest against Hitler's regime, created over 200 handcrafted political photomontages for the leftist AIZ publication, many seeking to expose the hidden dangers of the Nazi dictatorship and the lies it disseminated. Mimicry depicts Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, disguising Hitler as the 19th-Century revolutionary communist Karl Marx. The artist is warning the working classes not to be fooled by Hitler's promises that he genuinely supports workers' rights. Such work is comparable with political memes today that aim to speak truth to power. Image manipulation can both mislead us and help us find our way.
Fake! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages from the Rijksmuseum Collection is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam until 25 May 2026. If you liked this story, sign up for the Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
