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The Princess of Wales has owned up. In a statement on X/Twitter, she revealed that she was the phantom photoshopper: “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. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day.”
This Mother’s Day photograph of the Princess of Wales and her children was intended to kill the rampant speculation about her absence from the public eye over the last few weeks. Instead, the photograph itself has now been “killed” — in the parlance of the international news agencies that pulled it. These agencies have, understandably, a zero tolerance policy for manipulated photographs. And they weren’t happy with the clearly visible editing of the image.
The photo was taken by Prince William, to whom I want to shout: “You had one job!” This I feel quite frequently now when it comes to our future king, usually about the more important aspect of his remit. His one big job is to keep his mouth shut, smile and wave and occasionally say “How nice” or “Have you come far?,” for which he gets to live in splendor and barely worry about lifting a finger. Even blabbermouths like me would leap at that deal. But William can’t keep the old lips sealed, lecturing the Baftas about diversity or everyone about climate change and recently dishing up his two cents on Gaza.
But here’s another one job William has muffed. He needed to prove his missus was still OK. Royal conspiracy theories inevitably abound, and the absence of Kate while recovering from surgery has thrown a lit match on to them. All William had to do was to gather the family, point his phone, shout “say cheese,” snap a few snaps, choose the best one and press send. When Kate reached for her software, William should have said a firm “no.” He should have known what would happen.
In this day and age, with image editing tech in everybody’s hands, the old methods of proving a person’s continued good health — holding up today’s New York Times or standing next to a TV playing today’s show — really don’t cut it any longer. So why on earth did Kate think it was a good idea to fire up the Photoshop? The most obvious problem is that Princess Charlotte’s cuff seems to be dematerializing. And there are other infelicities: the snap starts to look like an old “Spot the Deliberate Mistake” competition in an annual. As for Charlotte’s footwear: why does it seem to have a heel on her right foot but a flat sole on the left? The pattern of the patio tiling doesn’t match up. The tree in the background is in full leaf in mid-March.
Then there are the hands. Stare at any photo long enough with a suspicious mind and the human body starts to look a bit uncanny. But doing strange things with your hands is a terrible no-no. Lunatics are obsessed with hands. In this image, nearly all the hands look odd. Prince Louis is crossing two of his fingers; not unusual in itself, but asking for trouble in such a crucial image. Kate isn’t wearing her wedding ring. Nobody seems to quite match up.
Kate isn’t the only one to fall into this trap
This image was going to be pored over, so keeping it simple and clear and untouched was essential. We humans love finding hidden messages in images, from The Arnolfini Wedding or Holbein’s The Ambassadors to the cover of Abbey Road. And just because you can do something — like edit a picture to try and improve it — doesn’t mean you should.
Kate isn’t the only one to fall into this trap. The proliferation of image editing tech has led to some very peculiar sights. The images promoting films and TV shows are rejigged, usually by committee, often to a ridiculous degree. Image cards on streamers are particularly odd. On one show I worked on, a key publicity image featuring an action scene was bounced around between so many people with copious notes that the end result was quite uncanny: the arms, legs, hair and bodily appendages of the lead characters ended up pointing all over the place. This resulted in a final version that was acceptable to everyone that had followed its fraught genesis, but looked bizarre to anyone coming to it with fresh eyes. One of the first to do so exclaimed memorably that the lead actress’s breasts were apparently trying to make off in the opposite direction to the rest of her: “Her body is at four o’clock but her boobs are at ten to two!”
Simplicity is the key. William and Kate need to follow the example of the more decorous royals. It’s impossible to imagine, for example, Princess Anne hunched forward over a monitor fiddling with her mouse. Just do the job, collect the cash, and then settle down to watch something nice — or perhaps have a lovely glass of wine in the garden under some seasonally appropriate foliage. Please, please, Kate and William: don’t try to be even slightly clever again.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
