At the turn of the last century, photographic post-cards became hugely popular, among them so called "photographic phantasies" which created surreal motives, based on all kinds of visual trickery (montage, close-ups, distortions) that the public had not yet been accustomed to. Some of them were purely for entertainment, others for advertisements, or even for political purposes.
Spiegel Online has a selection of them, based on an exhibition called "stamped fantasies" at the Folkwang Museum in Essen on the subject.
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Note: Kaiser Wilhelm II. as an armed insect. French Postcard, ca. 1900.
