Staged, Spliced, and Spectral: A History of Photo Trickery

Photography Has Been Fooling Us Since 1840

Photography was introduced to the world in the early 19th century. Almost immediately, it stopped being just a tool for documentation, and became a playground.

A vintage black and white postcard showing a dramatic scene of people in old-fashioned clothing leaping from one vehicle to another, with a steam engine on one side and a classic car on the other. — **Collision between a car and a steamroller (1915), Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

Long before Photoshop. Long before AI image generators. Long before the phrase “deepfake” existed.

People were already manipulating photographs.

The idea that images can be bent, staged, or fabricated is not a modern corruption of photography. It is part of its origin story.

From the earliest glass plates and chemical baths, artists and pranksters alike were experimenting with what a photograph could do, not just what it could record.

A man in a suit pushes a wheelbarrow containing a large human head with a cigarette in its mouth, set against a backdrop of a building with shutters. — **Photomontage of a man pushing a wheelbarrow containing a head** **(c 1900–1910), anonymous**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

The First Fakes

In 1917, two young cousins created one of the most famous photographic hoaxes in history. The images known as the Cottingley Fairies showed delicate winged creatures dancing in an English garden.

A black and white photograph featuring a girl with a floral crown, resting her chin on her hand amidst greenery, with several small fairy figures around her. — Cottingley Fairies, 1917.

They were charming. They were convincing.

They were made with paper cutouts and careful staging.

Even Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed the images might be genuine. The photographs circulated widely and became part of a larger cultural fascination with spiritualism and the unseen.

A vintage photograph depicting a male figure in an apron manipulating a tool over another man lying on a chair, with a partially visible expression of surprise or fear from a third figure's head at the bottom. — **Decapitation (c 1880–1900), FM Hotchkiss**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

What feels shocking now was simply ingenuity then. A borrowed camera, some illustrated fairies, and a bit of imagination were enough to bend reality.

Manipulation Is as Old as the Medium

As early as 1840, photographers were staging elaborate visual statements. Hippolyte Bayard created “Self Portrait as a Drowned Man,” a theatrical image of himself posed as a corpse. It was not meant to deceive for profit. It was commentary. Performance. Protest. A declaration about recognition and authorship in a rapidly evolving field.

A black and white photograph featuring two men in a studio setting. One man, dressed in a formal suit, appears startled and gestures dramatically, while the other man, wrapped in a white cloth, stands calmly next to a small table with a skull on it. — **Man startled by his own reflection (c 1870–1880), Leonard de Koningh**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

Elsewhere, so-called spirit photographers layered exposures to produce ghostly figures hovering behind the living. Others combined negatives to place people together who had never shared the same space.

These were not glitches. They were experiments.

A vintage photograph depicting two individuals in traditional attire: a young woman sitting at a spinning wheel and a boy holding a musical instrument. The background features a painted scene of a woman at work, immersed in a rustic interior setting with various household items. — **Daydream (c 1870–1890), anonymous**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

From the very beginning, photography existed somewhere between truth and theater.

The Darkroom Was the First Photoshop

For over 180 years, artists have been dodging, burning, cutting, pasting, masking, and compositing. Entire worlds were assembled in trays of chemicals under red light. Skies were replaced. Figures were inserted. Histories were rewritten.

What has changed in 2026 is not the human impulse to manipulate images. What has changed is speed and scale.

Vintage promotional postcard for the Transfield Sisters featuring saxophones and stylized text. The design includes two faces above each saxophone and an eye in the center. — **Advertisement for the Transfield Sisters (c 1904-1918), anonymous**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

Today, algorithms can fabricate entire realities in seconds. But the instinct behind it, the curiosity to stretch what is visible, has always been there.

A vintage postcard depicting Mulberry Bend Park in New York, featuring a bustling scene with pedestrians, historic buildings, and an early automobile with passengers flying above the park. — **Car floating above Mulberry Bend Park, New York (1908), Theodor Eismann**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

Photography has never been purely objective. It has always involved choice. Framing. Cropping. Staging. Interpretation.

And sometimes, playful deception.

Black and white photograph of two oversized geese being taken to market by three men, showcasing a rural outdoor setting with trees in the background. — **Taking our Geese to market (1909), Martin Post Card Company**
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum

A Creative Tradition, Not a Modern Problem

It is tempting to think of manipulated imagery as a symptom of our era. In truth, it is a creative tradition that runs back to the birth of the medium itself.

Humans have been bending photographs for nearly two centuries. Not only to deceive, but to explore, to critique, to amuse, and to imagine.

The tools evolve.

The impulse remains.

Via The BBC.