In January 2026, the White House posted an image of Minneapolis civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong on its X account. In the immediate aftermath of her arrest at an anti-ICE demonstration, she appears utterly distraught, her mouth open and sobbing, brow deeply furrowed, and tears streaming down her face. It wasn’t long, however, before the truth came out. The picture was actually an AI-manipulated fake, based on a still from a video of the arrest. In the real photograph, she remains calm and composed, showing little discernible emotion, and certainly no distress.

It was yet another disturbing reminder of how prevalent image manipulation has become in recent decades. From the advent of Photoshop in the 1990s to the birth of generative AI tools like Grok, which can completely undress a person with a simple prompt, fakes have become an inescapable feature of our media landscape, forcing us to constantly question what is real and what isn’t. But, as an intriguing exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is keen to point out, this phenomenon is nothing new – in fact, it’s almost as old as the medium of photography itself.

FAKE! Early Photocollages and Photomontages brings together dozens of works dating from 1860 to 1940, all of which distort or disrupt photographic images in various ways. Of course, the history of photography is littered with famous examples of fakery, from the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ of 1917 (which, despite being made by a pair of young school girls, were good enough to fool Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) to Stalin’s notorious penchant for having his enemies airbrushed out of history. But this show takes a less familiar path into the medium’s somewhat slippery relationship with the truth. Drawn entirely from the museum’s own collection, exhibits range from early advertising images, book jackets and magazine covers, to mass-produced postcards and anonymous 19th-century photo albums. Viewed together, they make it clear that the inherently malleable potential of photography was recognised at a very early stage, allowing people to play with and transform the world around them in surprisingly creative ways.

Within a few short years of its birth in 1839, amateur photographers had already begun to deconstruct the medium, pulling it apart and putting it back together in new and unexpected forms. They would cut up images, rework them with pen and brush, combine them with other pictures, incorporate them into drawings, or surround them with handwritten text. The results of these early experiments filled many a private album in the latter half of the 19th century, and the examples shown here offer a glimpse into a dusty, bygone age, their meaning long since lost to the mists of time. But their spirit of inventiveness survives and, in some cases, can seem surprisingly modern. The combination of two faces, probably lovers, pasted onto a wood engraving of Pierre Auguste Cot’s painting Springtime, has an oddness reminiscent of Max Ernst, while an intricate collage weaving together dozens of Victorian celebrities (most now long-forgotten) could be a distant ancestor of the Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton and Robert Rauschenberg.

But the development of trick photography and new darkroom techniques expanded these possibilities exponentially, allowing a more seamless transition between reality and fantasy, with results that could be charmingly surreal and sometimes even a little unsettling. In an album of anonymous French photomontages dating from around 1900, we see a man pushing a wheelbarrow laden with a giant replica of his own head, which stares back at him, nonchalantly puffing on a cigarette. Elsewhere, a young boy sits on a ladder trapped inside a jar, a striking image that cleverly disrupts our sense of scale. Is the jar enormous? Or has the boy been shrunk to fit inside? There’s a temptation to read these images symbolically or metaphorically, but that rather defeats their point. They are the visual equivalent of popular magic tricks, like sawing a man in half. We are aware that what we are seeing is not real, but the nuts and bolts of the illusion remain an enticing mystery.

This kind of visual magic had obvious commercial potential, and trick images would be mass-produced in the late 19th century, either as small cartes de visite or larger prints mounted on card, which could be collected or traded. These often relied on impossible doublings, in which the same figure appears more than once, to present theatrical tableaux with comic or gently moralising undertones. It would be hard to imagine a more blatant memento mori than Man Startled by his Own Reflection (c.1870-1880) by Leonard de Koningh, in which a bourgeois patriarch is startled by his own sinister mirror image, shrouded in white, standing beside a table with a skull on it.

As the 20th century dawned, the picture postcard offered a new vehicle for photographic sleight of hand. The ‘Exaggeration’ or ‘Tall Tale’ card became a genre unto itself in North America before the First World War, especially in the Great Plains regions. Such cards depicted impossibly large animals or crops being transported to market, mythologising the agricultural abundance of specific regions in a comically inflated manner. In one example, two men sit astride a gargantuan ear of corn, twice the length of the cart on which it’s being carried, while another shows a pair of enormous geese that look like they could eat the men dragging them along for breakfast.

While these, and indeed most of the images included in the exhibition, are very obvious manipulations, often charmingly naive, some are rather more convincing. It’s hard to tell, for example, what viewers in 1910 would have made of a postcard depicting an early aviation display in Los Angeles. The planes, impossibly close together, and the audience’s indifference, which gazes off in a completely different direction, make it obvious to a modern eye that this is a montage. But the effect is achieved quite seamlessly, and for an audience less familiar with photography, let alone the workings of aeroplanes, the line between real and fake might have been harder to detect.

Some images, however, were deliberately made with deception in mind. One notable example is a small French postcard from 1871 depicting a massacre of Dominican monks during the final ‘Bloody Week’ of the Paris Commune. The work of Parisian portrait photographer Eugène Appert, it formed part of a series expressly designed to inflame anti-Communard sentiment by dramatically amplifying the brutality of the rebels. Although based on real events, the image itself is a flagrant sham. The scenes were restaged by actors in Appert’s studio, their figures cut and pasted into the appropriate backdrops, with the heads of the Commune’s leading figures superimposed on their bodies. Although the theatrical staging might seem obvious today, many people at the time believed it was real. Indeed, they proved so effective as political propaganda that the series was eventually banned by the French government for ‘disturbing the public peace.’

The power of photomontage to influence public opinion was taken to new artistic heights in the 1930s by the German artist John Heartfield (pseudonym of Helmut Herzfeld), whose covers for the left-wing Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper) ruthlessly satirised Hitler and the Nazi party. In Mimikry (1934), he shows Joseph Goebbels hanging a Karl Marx beard around Hitler’s face, suggesting that the führer was attempting to hoodwink the working classes through his promises to protect workers’ rights. It’s an undeniably powerful image, somehow both real and unreal, like a satirical newspaper cartoon brought to life. Widely visible on newsstands at the time, Heartfield’s highly distinctive work made a deep impression and clearly got under the skin of his targets. Shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the SS raided his apartment, and he was forced to flee Berlin, eventually rising to number five on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted list.

Among the many current debates about AI and deepfakes, Heartfield’s work, and most of the images on display here, offer a timely reminder that the manipulation of images is not in itself harmful. The creative opportunities it affords have been exploited for more than 150 years, and continue to inform the practice of many of the greatest photographers of recent times, from the late Erwin Olaf to Andreas Gursky. It’s only when fake images are presented as real that we need to be afraid, especially as our ability to tell one from the other seems to be rapidly diminishing with each passing year. In a sense, then, this exhibition is something of a sugar-coated pill. Without delving too deeply into ethical debates, it offers a nostalgic glimpse back into a more innocent age. In doing so, however, it can’t help but make us contemplate how different the future might be.