The past one and a half week haven’t been the best for royalty watchers. The Princess of Wales had photoshopped the photo of her with her children Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis that was released on Mother’s Day, Sunday 10 March 2024. Kate herself confessed the next day after receiving a lot of criticism: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” It unfortunately didn’t stop the criticism.
Many blamed the Princess herself. Of course, it was quite stupid, because when looking at the photo carefully, several alterations were rather well visible. People nowadays love to analyse photos to an extent one sometimes can hardly imagine. If you use a photoshop program for important photos, that are to be published in the whole world, it should be done by a professional at least. But the extent of the criticism really shocked me. It seems to me that the fact that Catherine – because of a large abdominal operation – hasn’t been seen in public since Christmas 2023, plays a major role. Both royalty watchers, trolls and media have suddenly lost the person they sometimes like to talk about all day. And there is hardly anything to talk about, so everybody seems to be terribly bored. It means that people go wild with their conspiracy theories. Furthermore, the media and lots of other people demand to be informed about what is exactly wrong with the princess. While we know she doesn’t have cancer, it has not been announced what is going on. To me, it is not up to us to decide whether we should be allowed to know, unless it is life-threatening. Hopefully, she will reappear on the royal scene sometime in April 2024. I know myself how much impact a major operation has on someone’s life, so I don’t blame her for taking the time she needs to recover and keep silent about her situation, although the court probably could have been more open about her recovery.
Royal photoshopping is not new. Already in the past years there were several British royal photos that appeared to be altered a bit. Photo agency Getty is currently going through older royal photos and came up with the picture of Queen Elizabeth and most of her great-grandchildren and her two youngest grandchildren in Summer 2022, but also with the official christening photo of Archie Mountbatten-Windsor in July 2019. One remembers also the Christmas card 2018 of the Dutch royal family, a photo by the photographer Erwin Olaf, showing King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima with their three daughters Amalia, Alexia and Ariane, clearly photoshopped, but professionally. Unforgettable are the Christmas card 2005 and the Christmas card 2007 of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain with their grandchildren, that were very badly photoshopped. Early this year we received a photo on the occasion of the 13th birthday of Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine of Denmark, that turned out to be manipulated. The Belgian media in 2013 spoke about the unnatural portrait of then Crown Princess Mathilde for her 40th birthday. The photographer, Michel Gronemberger, said he had used special lighting techniques. If one goes back much further in time, it should be noted royal photos were already altered heavily in the 19th century. The British Queen Victoria and the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina actually met in 1895. However, a photo was never taken. For the known image of both Queens two photo portraits were combined in one image. Wilhelmina’s photo was actually taken a year earlier, the one of Victoria nearly two years before their meeting.
And yes, all these photos were distributed to the media and passed on. Even more, they were sold all over the world, as these photos are usually quite popular. On their website, AP says, that minor adjustments like “cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into greyscale, elimination of dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints and normal toning and colour adjustments” are acceptable. What they don’t accept is “changes in density, contrast, colour and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene”. Even the removal of red eyes is not permissible, and backgrounds shouldn’t be blurred. It turns out that this already seems to count since 1990, when AP made its transition to digital processing of its images and imaging technology became more and more sophisticated, although AI wasn’t known back then. While in the past simply the words “image manipulation” were added to the database, it seems that is not always the case. In Kate’s case the photo lead to lots of speculation, as she hadn’t been seen in public for over two months, and in the end was taken offline and withdrawn. Both AP and other agencies have removed Kate’s photo, actually taken by the Prince of Wales, from their database.
The question is: whom to blame? Kate, the British royal court or maybe the press agencies? Myself, I think that if photo agencies don’t want to sell manipulated photos taken by their photographers, they also shouldn’t accept them from royal families. They should clearly communicate that to the (British) royal court, and preferably they should also communicate that to the royals, like Kate, who are fond of releasing their own photos. DISCREETLY! It is not that there were no signs in the past that photos were actually manipulated. If only the royal court itself knew, they should surely have informed Kate herself. The British royals were certainly not the only ones, although they are the most popular royal family in the world. And that is something also the agencies know: their photos sell and thus bring in money! It is easy to say that Kate knew she couldn’t hand out manipulated photos, as I don’t think she actually did (I work for a photo agency and didn’t even know; to my excuse, I work in the text department). One thing for sure: the British royal court hasn’t handled the situation well and should think over what they have done wrong to avoid any other situations like this in the future.
Lesson learnt, hopefully also by other royal families. Now everybody should move on and give Kate the time to recover further, so we soon can enjoy her presence at royal engagements again.