It’s been more than two months since the Princess of Wales’s Mother’s Day photo fiasco. It’s still crazy to me that all of it went down on Oscar weekend, and that the royal fiasco completely overshadowed the Oscars that night and the day after. On Oscar night, Reuters, the Associated Press, AFP and Getty all “killed” the frankenphoto which was issued by Kensington Palace. The agencies killed the pic after the palace refused to show them the original image or give those agencies any sort of information. Basically, Kensington Palace created a hacked-together frankenphoto, lied about it repeatedly, then froze when questioned. Hours later, “Kate” took the blame for “editing” the photo in a tweet. Since then, KP has changed the way they issue photos – they no longer give media outlets or agencies “handouts.” Now the palace just posts photos on social media and lies about when the photos were taken and no one is saying sh-t about it. Additionally, photo agencies are reviewing all previously-issued palace photos (and finding that many were manipulated too).
So, there’s a new royal portrait exhibition at Buckingham Palace, and the curator of the exhibit sort of went on the record about the Mother’s Day frankenphoto. For more than two months, Kensington Palace has been trying to rewrite this whole narrative and minimize how badly they f–ked up. As you can imagine, the curator parrots some palace talking points.
The curator of a new exhibition of royal portraits at Buckingham Palace has defended the practice of retouching images despite controversy over a Mother’s Day photo taken by Prince William.
Alessandro Nasini, the curator behind the exhibition celebrating 100 years of royal portrait photographs, said retouching – which can vary from simply cropping an image to removing entire backgrounds – remains a vital tool in royal portrait photography. Many of the photos on display to the public at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, from today have been retouched and notes describe the process.
His comments came two months after five major news and picture agencies issued ‘kill notices’ withdrawing a photograph of the Princess of Wales with her children for Mother’s Day because it had been digitally altered. Kate later admitted she had been experimenting with editing the family photo.
In spite of tougher media guidelines over image manipulation amid concerns that the public has to be able to trust that pictures are genuine in an era of AI and deepfakes, Mr Nasini, curator of photographs at the Royal Collection, said it was a vital tool.
He said: ‘I am not familiar with those particular [media tests] but retouching per se has always been part of photography really since the inception of photography. It’s very important specifically for portrait photography because it’s a creative process. It’s not press photography, it’s not reportage, it’s not commercial photography. It’s just simply a tool that has always been used by photographers to translate their vision, the aesthetics, into the final print. It’s part of the creative process. It’s just one of the tools.’
Mr Nasini was steered away by a PR minder from commenting further on the controversy over the photo of Kate with her children, which came during a period of wild and inaccurate speculation about the whereabouts of the Princess.
Again, we’re not talking about “retouching” or “cropping.” The issue is not that Kensington Palace issued photos where a pimple was removed or the lighting was brightened. KP has been regularly handing out frankenphotos which were hacked together, with whole-ass children being edited it and out. Not to mention that the Mother’s Day photo was specifically issued as proof-of-life and a health update for Kate. It’s insane that all of this has just… gone away, or been put on pause, while the palace frantically tries their revisionist history bullsh-t.
Photos courtesy of Kensington Palace.
