It appears that at 9.54pm last Friday and again on Saturday morning, the Princess of Wales or someone close to her uploaded a family picture onto a Mac and fiddled with it using Adobe Photoshop in up to 16 places.
So what? Plenty of supporters of Britain’s royal family will defend its right to touch up pictures, and plenty of people will claim not to understand what the fuss is about.
But the doctored picture of Kate and her smiling children is still
- unprecedented – it’s the first royal “handout” ever pulled from circulation by all the world’s top picture agencies for failing to meet their authenticity standards;
- unfortunate – it was meant to end speculation about Kate’s health two months after abdominal surgery, but has only invited more; and
- unlikely to silence those who say the royals’ communications operation is malfunctioning because the family is too; unmoored since the death of the queen.
Palace intrigue. There are fair questions to be asked about the stability and staffing of the royal family when a picture it knew would be minutely scrutinised is revealed in a few hours to be an epic Photoshop fail.
An apology was issued yesterday in Kate’s name, and the words “I do occasionally experiment with editing” may yet become her catchphrase. In the meantime there will be those who ask:
- Why did she feel the need?
- Who let it through?
The most plausible answers are mundane: that her husband William took the picture but failed to get the whole family smiling at once; and that the couple’s senior staff, new in their roles, collectively blundered, not knowing there was to be a Mother’s Day picture for the press until the last moment.
None of which will satisfy the millions of royal-watchers who prefer conspiracy to cock-up and immediately seized on Kensington Palace’s refusal to release the original picture yesterday as evidence of the former.
Even to non-conspiracists, the palace’s handling of cuff-gate (it started with questions about Princess Charlotte’s right sleeve) has been an object lesson in how not to calm a febrile public mood.
Less is more. Before yesterday, the last confirmed unaltered photograph of Kate available to the public was taken on Christmas Day.
Since then…
- She and her father-in-law, the king, fell ill and Buckingham Palace undertook to keep the public informed about their health.
- That set up a tension between modern expectations of transparency and the “never complain, never explain” mantra Charles inherited from his mother.
Kate and William seem happier with the mantra than transparency. On 29 February Kensington Palace reminded the press they had promised only “significant updates” on her condition, and there haven’t been any. Instead, a social media vacuum sucking in conspiracy theories from all over the world has led to what the PR veteran Mark Borkowski calls “a series of unintended consequences” – including the frenzy over this photograph.
Photo kill. There were 50 million views of the edited picture on X / Twitter by the time it was rumbled at 7.30pm on Sunday. The AP retracted its version, then Reuters, AFP, Getty, Shutterstock and eventually the UK’s Press Association when it sought clarification of Kate’s apology and didn’t get it.
By that time the world had learned that a) the big photo agencies are carving out new roles as arbiters of truth; and b) “photo kills” are issued when a picture fails to meet their standards. Sharpening colour contrast is sometimes allowed. Fixing “red eye” never is.
The AP transmits 84,000 images a month and recalls about 12 of them with photo kills.
What’s true? The agency said there was no evidence the royal picture was fake, much less faked with AI. But context is everything and the context in this case is a world of images that can be manipulated at lightning speed by anyone with an agenda or without a conscience, or both – like Donald Trump, depicted by supporters last week with groups of Black voters he’d never met.
What’s more… In Windsor, even certifiably authentic photographs can flatter to deceive. When the first confirmed picture of Kate and William since Christmas went up online yesterday, she was looking away in the back seat of their Range Rover. One X user said she’d seen better pictures of Bigfoot.
