Princess of Wales photo controversy shows we’ve been thinking about edited images the wrong way

By Joshua Habgood-Coote, University of Leeds

The spread of deepfake videos, digitally altered photos and images produced by artifical intelligence threaten our ability to discern truth from fiction. Experts have warned of a coming “infocalypse”, and of the consequences for this year’s bumper crop of elections.

Yet the biggest story about photographic manipulation so far in 2024 is that the Princess of Wales manually edited a family portrait. The image was released by Kensington Palace on Mother’s Day to reassure the public about her health.

After noticing signs that the picture was edited, press agencies issued “kill notices” instructing all papers to withdraw the image. This led to more speculation, and an apology from Catherine on X (formerly Twitter) conceding that she does “occasionally experiment with editing”.

The response to this controversy can help us think about the wider challenge of manipulated images and video. In my view, we shouldn’t think of edited photos as a harbinger of disaster spurred by new technology. Rather, they are merely the most recent stage in a long social problem of fakery that we have been navigating for decades.

A royal history of faked photographs

Catherine is not the first British royal to experiment with photography. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were early enthusiasts, first sitting for photographs in the 1840s. During this time, composite images – which combine multiple exposures into one image – were widespread, owing to the limitations of photographic technology.

Early photographers in the pictorialist movement, explored the artistic possibilities of photographic manipulation, valuing photography as an art form more than as a medium of documentary.

Some of these composite photographs, such as Henry Peach Robinson’s image Fading Away, were controversial, because of both their subject matter and technique. They were seen as undermining the reliability of the medium. Victoria and Albert took the side of pictorialist photographers, purchasing copies of composite images by Robinson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander and others.

Portrait photographers employed similar techniques.

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