The startling images show that fake news is not just a 21st century thing

Rijksmuseum

Remember that picture of the late Pope Francis from 2023, looking sideways in a huge white jacket? The photo went viral before it was revealed that it was generated by Midjourney’s AI tool. Fake images and videos flood the internet today, but a new exhibition explores how people have been manipulating photos almost since the medium was invented.

Take this startling image of a giant ear of corn (above). Taken – or perhaps more accurately created – by WH Martin in 1908 as part of a series of postcards depicting outlandish produce or livestock. Martin photographed each element his scene, cutting and pasting shots before reshooting a new shot.

His work is part of the exhibition FALSE! Early photo collages and photomontagesthrough May 25 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Below is a photomontage postcard from before 1908, a vision of a future New York where cars can fly. The colors were added later in the printing process and the outlines lightly retouched, giving it the feel of a drawing, although it is a photograph.

According to the Rijksmuseum, photographers began cutting and pasting images as early as 1860. The exhibition traces the development of image manipulation from that time until World War II.

Below is a disturbing image of a wheelbarrow containing a giant head from the 1900s to 1910s.

Finally, the period’s delight in gargantuan farm produce rears its head again in a 1908 postcard in which geese dwarfed by their human owners are driven to market.

topics: