Abraham Lincoln vs John Calhoun: the original deepfake photo of a US president

Side by side image of the original 1852 painting of John Calhoun, next to the 1865 print that superimposes a photograph of Abraham Lincoln to replace the original head.

Today, we're terrified that photographs have been manipulated by AI. Before that it was deepfakes, and Photoshop, and predating that we worried that images had been airbrushed. 

But images have been doctored for literally hundreds of years – including one of the most iconic portraits of Abraham Lincoln, which was created by superimposing a photograph of Honest Abe taken in 1864 onto a painting of slavery advocate John Calhoun created in 1852.