\n But while the technology that lets us create pictures of breakdancing babies and gangster cats is constantly evolving, doctoring images is nothing new \u2014 as an upcoming exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam demonstrates.\n <\/p>\n
\n Opening Friday, \u201cFake!\u201d shows how visual illusions have been created since the mid-19th century.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWe all talk about AI nowadays,\u201d the exhibition\u2019s curator, Hans Rooseboom, told CNN in a video call. \u201cWe\u2019re used to Photoshop and other digital ways of altering images, but we wanted to show that it\u2019s always been the case, since the very early days of photography.\n <\/p>\n
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\n \u201cPeople have always had the tendency to play around with all the possibilities photography offers, both with the camera and in the darkroom, or with scissors and glue in a non-digital way.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n The show features 52 images from the museum\u2019s collection dating from 1860 to 1940, all of which were devised using collage or montage. To create a photocollage, the artist physically cuts and pastes images together. In a photomontage, multiple pictures are combined and then rephotographed.\n <\/p>\n
\n Like much of what we see from AI today, many of these early images show obviously fantastical scenes \u2014 like a man pushing a giant version of his own head in a wheelbarrow, or an enormous ear of corn being dragged along by horse and cart.\n <\/p>\n
\n But in an era when going viral was not yet a thing, why did early photographers go to such lengths to create false images?\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t people fake photographs?\u201d asked Rooseboom. Photography \u201chas never been realistic,\u201d he said, particularly in the 19th century, when people were \u201cmore accustomed to seeing paintings, prints, drawings that do not tell the literal truths.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cPeople were only slowly getting used to photography and maybe slowly getting used to the idea that photographs could be more realistic than other images.\u201d But, he added: \u201cThere\u2019s very little comments from the time, so we hardly know the audience\u2019s reactions to what they saw.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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\n The overwhelming motive for the early fakes was to provide entertainment \u2014 about three-quarters of the images in the exhibition were created for this purpose, Rooseboom said. Others were created for advertising or to make a political statement.\n <\/p>\n
\n John Heartfield, the pseudonym of German artist Helmut Herzfeld, was a leading photographic satirist who was fiercely opposed to Hitler and his Nazi party. Heartfield\u2019s 1934 image, used on the front cover of the left-wing Workers\u2019 Illustrated Magazine (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) shows Joseph Goebbels, chief Nazi propagandist, as Hitler\u2019s barber.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt\u2019s Hitler, but Goebbels is turning him into (Karl) Marx in order to attract the workers\u2019 electorate,\u201d Rooseboom said.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cHeartfield is both the best-known and, I think, the smartest person to have used photography to mock Nazism and all that the regime did, and to try to warn people about all the dangers that were looming or already taking place.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt\u2019s very interesting because that kind of satire is still very prevalent, if not more so than ever.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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\n In contrast with the early flights of fantasy and satire, photojournalism really only began to evolve in the inter-war period, and with it came a new expectation on photography to be truthful.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cPeople were only starting to get used to seeing a lot of photographs in the 1920s and 1930s with popular magazines,\u201d said Rooseboom.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThere was no mistrust [prior to that period] because people were only used to seeing hand-drawn images, so only slowly the idea crept in that photography could and should tell the truth.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n In about three-quarters of the images featured in the exhibition, the fakery is \u201creally clear,\u201d said Rooseboom \u2014 giving the example of someone who appears to have performed a theatrical decapitation \u2014 but in some, it\u2019s harder to detect how the manipulation was done.\n <\/p>\n
\n For example, Rooseboom pointed to a \u201clittle postcard from an aviation show somewhere in LA, with a lot of airplanes in the air. But the audience is not paying attention, and they are very close together. That simply must be a montage because that cannot have taken place in reality that way.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI always wonder if people back then would have seen through the trick or not,\u201d Rooseboom said.\n <\/p>\n
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\n \u201cWe see more photographs every single day than most people in the 19th century would have seen in their whole life. So we are more or less used to looking at and judging photographs. Maybe it was much harder to distinguish between [what was] real and not real.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n In many instances, the images were created by anonymous photographers and reproduced as postcards. The postcard of a man wheeling his own head was made using an \u201camateur trick\u201d of photomontage, according to Rooseboom. This would have involved combining several negatives, either by printing them together in a darkroom or cutting and pasting and then rephotographing them.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt was described in various magazines and little booklets from the 1890s both in France and elsewhere. So you could learn this trick by following a kind of recipe,\u201d he said of the image, thought to have been produced between 1900 and 1910 by an anonymous artist.\n <\/p>\n
\n Peter Ainsworth is a course leader for the MA in Photography and Digital Practice at London College of Communication. He told CNN that artists who digitally manipulate images today often do so to make a point. \u201cIt\u2019s often used as a satire,\u201d he said, adding that creators seek to provide \u201ca critical voice towards the problems inherent in the technology.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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