Startling images show how fake news isn’t just a 21st century issue

Rijksmuseum

Remember that image of the late Pope Francis from 2023, looking hip in a huge, white puffer jacket? The photo went viral before it emerged that it had been generated by AI tool Midjourney. Fake images and videos flood the internet these days, but a new exhibition explores how people have been manipulating photographs almost since the medium was invented.

Take this startling image of a huge ear of corn (above). It was taken – or perhaps created is a better word – by W. H. Martin in 1908 as part of a series of postcards depicting outlandishly sized produce or livestock. Martin photographed each element of his scene, cutting and pasting the shots together before re-photographing the new image.

His piece is part of the exhibition FAKE! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages, on until 25 May at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Below is a photomontage postcard dating to before 1908, a vision of a future New York where cars can fly. The colours were added later in the printing process and the outlines slightly retouched, giving it the air of a drawing, although it is a photo.

According to the Rijksmuseum, photographers started cutting up and pasting images together as early as 1860. The exhibition traces the development of image manipulation from then up until the second world war.

Below is a disturbing image of a wheelbarrow containing a huge head, dated to between 1900 and 1910.

And finally, the era’s delight in gargantuan farm produce rears its head again in a 1908 postcard in which geese dwarfing their human owners are herded to market.