Fake photos are practically as old as photography itself.

French photographer Hippolyte Bayard felt he had missed out on the recognition for inventing photography and had it taken from him by Louis Daguerre. In protest, he staged a picture of himself, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, and wrote a note in which he said the man depicted had been “lying in the morgue for days, no-one has recognised him or claimed him!”

He signed it himself: “H.B. 18 October, 1840”; the usually accepted beginning of photography is 1839. As soon as we knew what photographs were, we used them to trick people.