TITLE_NAME :
02/06/2026 - 05/25/2026
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Museumstraat 1
1071 XX Amsterdam
At a time when AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated, you may ask yourself: when is a photograph real or fake? Yet images have been manipulated, often with surprising ease, since the very beginnings of photography. In FAKE! you will explore 50 historical images from our collection that reveal creative and deceptive visual illusions.
Photographers started cutting, pasting and drawing on photographs to create photocollages and photomontages as early as 1860. FAKE! traces the development of their creative techniques right up to 1940. Digital tools like Photoshop didn’t exist back then, so everything was done by hand. Using only scissors, glue, ink and pencil, they created images that were humorous, strange or completely impossible. Some of the pictures are clearly fantastical, while others only reveal how they were made upon closer inspection.
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Museumstraat 1
1071 XX Amsterdam
At a time when AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated, you may ask yourself: when is a photograph real or fake? Yet images have been manipulated, often with surprising ease, since the very beginnings of photography. In FAKE! you will explore 50 historical images from our collection that reveal creative and deceptive visual illusions.
Photographers started cutting, pasting and drawing on photographs to create photocollages and photomontages as early as 1860. FAKE! traces the development of their creative techniques right up to 1940. Digital tools like Photoshop didn’t exist back then, so everything was done by hand. Using only scissors, glue, ink and pencil, they created images that were humorous, strange or completely impossible. Some of the pictures are clearly fantastical, while others only reveal how they were made upon closer inspection.