NEWS ANALYSIS
Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R.
Blemish
A Mother’s Day photo was meant to douse speculation
about the Princess of Wales’ health. It did the opposite — and threatened to
undermine trust in the royal family.
Mark
Landler
By Mark
Landler
Reporting
from London
March 11,
2024
If a
picture is worth a thousand words, then a digitally altered picture of an
absent British princess is apparently worth a million.
That seemed
to be the lesson after another day of internet-breaking rumors and conspiracy
theories swirling around Catherine, Princess of Wales, who apologized on Monday
for having doctored a photograph of herself with her three children that
circulated on news sites and social media on Sunday.
It was the
first official photo of Catherine since before she underwent abdominal surgery
two months ago — a cheerful Mother’s Day snapshot, taken by her husband, Prince
William, at home. But if it was meant to douse weeks of speculation about
Catherine’s well-being, it had precisely the opposite effect.
Now the
British royal family faces a storm of questions about how it communicates with
the press and public, whether Catherine manipulated other family photos she
released in previous years, and whether she felt driven to retouch this photo
to disguise the impact of her illness.
It adds up
to a fresh tempest for a royal family that has lurched from one self-created
crisis to another. Unlike previous episodes, this involves one of the family’s
most popular members, a commoner-turned-future queen. It also reflects a social
media celebrity culture driven in part by the family itself, one that is worlds
away from the intrusive paparazzi pictures that used to cause royals, including
a younger Kate Middleton, chagrin.
“Like so
many millennial celebrities, the Princess of Wales has built a successful
public image by sharing with her audience a carefully curated version of her
personal life,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian who has studied the
relationship between the monarchy and the media. The manipulated photograph, he
said, is damaging because, for the public, it “brings into question the
authenticity” of Catherine’s home life.
Authenticity
is the least of it: the mystery surrounding Catherine’s illness and prolonged
recovery, out of the public eye, has spawned wild rumors about her physical and
mental health, her whereabouts, and her relationship with William.
The
discovery that the photo was altered prompted several international news
agencies to issue advisories — including one from The Associated Press that was
ominously called a “kill notification” — urging news organizations to remove
the image from their websites and scrub it from any social media.
Mr. Owens
called the incident a “debacle.”
“At a time
when there is much speculation about Catherine’s health, as well as rumors
swelling online about her and Prince William’s private lives,” he said, “the
events of the last two days have done nothing to dispel questions and
concerns.”
Kensington
Palace, where Catherine and William have their offices, declined to release an
unedited copy of the photograph on Monday, which left amateur visual detectives
to continue scouring the image for signs of alteration in the poses of the
princess and her three children, George, Charlotte, and Louis.
The A.P.
said its examination yielded evidence that there was “an inconsistency in the
alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.” The image has a range of clear
visual inconsistencies that suggest it was doctored. A part of a sleeve on
Charlotte’s cardigan is missing, a zipper on Catherine’s jacket and her hair is
misaligned, and a pattern in her hair seems clearly artificial.
Samora
Bennett-Gager, an expert in photo retouching, identified multiple signs of
image manipulation. The edges of Charlotte’s legs, he said, were unnaturally
soft, suggesting that the background around them had been shifted. Catherine’s
hand on the waist of her youngest son, Louis, is blurry, which he said could
indicate that the image was taken from a separate frame of the shoot.
Taken
together, Mr. Bennett-Gager said, the changes suggested that the photo was a
composite drawn from multiple images rather than a single image smoothed out
with a Photoshop program. A spokesman for Catherine declined to comment on her
proficiency in photo editing.
Even before
Catherine’s apology, the web exploded with memes of “undoctored” photos. One
showed a bored-looking Catherine smoking with a group of children. Another,
which the creator said was meant to “confirm she is absolutely fine and
recovering well,” showed the princess splashing down a water slide.
Beyond the
mockery, the royal family faces a lingering credibility gap. Catherine has been
an avid photographer for years, capturing members of the royal family in candid
situations: Queen Camilla with a basket of flowers; Prince George with his
great-grandfather, Prince Philip, on a horse-drawn buggy.
The palace
has released many of these photos, and they are routinely published on the
front pages of British papers (The Times of London splashed the Mother’s Day
picture over three columns). A former palace official predicted that the news
media would now examine the earlier photographs to see if they, too, had been
altered.
That would
put Kensington Palace in the tricky position of having to defend one of its
most effective communicators against a potentially wide-ranging problem, and
one over which the communications staff has little control. After a deluge of
inquires about the photograph, the palace left it to Catherine to explain what
happened. She was contrite, but presented herself as just another frustrated
shutterbug with access to Photoshop.
“Like many
amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she wrote on
social media. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family
photograph we shared yesterday caused.”
Catherine’s
use of social media sets her apart from older members of the royal family, who
rely on the traditional news media to present themselves. When King Charles III
taped a video message to mark Commonwealth Day, for example, Buckingham Palace
hired a professional camera crew that was paid for by British broadcasters, a
standard arrangement for royal addresses.
When
Charles left the hospital after being treated for an enlarged prostate, he and
Queen Camilla walked in front of a phalanx of cameras, smiling and waving as
they made their way to their limousine.
Catherine
was not seen entering or leaving the hospital for her surgery, nor were her
children photographed visiting her. That may reflect the gravity of her health
problems, royal watchers said, but it also reflects the determination of
William and Catherine to erect a zone of privacy around their personal lives.
William,
royal experts said, is also driven by a desire not to repeat the experience of
his mother, Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 after a
high-speed pursuit by photographers. Catherine, too, has been victimized by
paparazzi, winning damages from a French court in 2017 after a celebrity
magazine published revealing shots of her on vacation in France.
Last week,
grainy photos of Catherine riding in a car with her mother surfaced on the
American celebrity gossip site TMZ. British newspapers reported the existence
of the photos but did not publish them out of deference to the palace’s appeal
that she be allowed to recuperate in privacy.
Catherine
and William are not the only members of their royal generation who have sought
to exercise control over their image. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, posted
photos of themselves on Instagram, even using their account to announce their
withdrawal from royal duties in 2020.
Catherine’s
embrace of social media to circulate her pictures is a way of reclaiming her
life from the long lenses of the paparazzi. But the uproar over the Mother’s
Day photo shows that this strategy comes with its own risks, not least that a
family portrait has added to the very misinformation about her that it was
calculated to counteract.
On Monday
afternoon, Catherine found herself back in traditional royal mode. She was
photographed, fleetingly, in the back of a car with William as he left Windsor
Castle for a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. Kensington Palace
said she was on her way to a private appointment.
Gaia
Tripoli and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
Mark
Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom,
as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has
been a journalist for more than three decades. More about
Mark Landler
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