The Perfect, Imperfect Royal Family Photo

A scandal erupts in Kensington Palace over a doctored image. Nothing new, carry on.

On January 17, 1852, Queen Victoria gathered her children for a family photo. The Queen tapped famed photographer William Edward Kilburn to shoot the portrait, a Daguerreotype. But, to the Queen’s dismay, her eyes were closed in the photo. The Queen looked, as she wrote in her diary, “horrid.”¹

So, Queen Victoria edited it…

Photograph by William Edward Kilburn

…by scratching out her face.

One hundred and seventy-two years later, the Princess of Wales, Catherine “Kate” Middleton, gathered her children for a family photo. The Princess tapped her husband William, the future King of England, to shoot the portrait. And it’s a lovely photo — until you take a closer look.

Photograph by the Prince of Wales

The first red flag I noticed was the weirdness around Charlotte’s left wrist — a portion of her sleeve mysteriously disappears. Then there's the zipper on Kate’s jacket — sloppily misaligned, evidence of a different photo being superimposed.

Photograph by the Prince of Wales

It was meant to be the first official photo of Kate since undergoing surgery in January, a visual “all’s well” to end rumors and conspiracy theories about her absence. And it did, at first. The British media devoured the photo…

…then the Associated Press killed it. The photo backfired.

The internet roiled. X felt like Twitter again and TikTok detectives were on the case. One of the most absurd theories that blew up was that Kate’s face was swapped with her 2016 Vogue cover shoot by Josh Olins. It wasn’t.

But that doesn’t seem to matter these days. We live in the age of conspiracy, saturated with confirmation bias — if you see something, you’re going to believe it. And if you believe it, you're going to see it.

“At this point, I think if there was a video of Kate holding a paper with today’s date on it published, we’d still have an online army explaining how you can tell it’s an AI-generated fake from the pixels,” Eliot Higgins, an investigative journalist, told The Cut.

One interesting detail to surface in #KateGate — the EXIF data shows that the Princess of Wales shoots with a Canon 5d Mark IV and a 50/1.2, on manual exposure mode. That’s right, Kate shoots M, not AV.

I also discovered that it’s not the first time Kate edited a royal family photo. The Princess of Wales shot this photo of Queen Elizabeth with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren at Balmoral in 2022.

Photograph by the Princess of Wales

Another lovely photo, but when you take a closer look, the same red flags appear — gross misalignments, sloppy cloning, heavy-handed heal brushing.

Photograph by the Princess of Wales

I don’t believe anything sinister is happening here — rather, it’s the royal family’s relentless pursuit of perfection. A quest that spans centuries.

Even Queen Elizabeth’s favourite photographer, Cecil Beaton, doctored his portraits — subtly slimming the Queen Mother's waistline and face in this 1939 photo.

Photographs by Cecil Beaton

Side note: that ridiculously-cool, ornate background is a flipped reproduction of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, oil on canvas, 1767

But, I digress…back to Cecil Beaton. In 1942, he went even further and completely removed then-Princess Elizabeth from a portrait of her and Princess Margaret. You can see the altered portrait on the bottom right on this page of “royally-approved” photographs.

Photographs by Cecil Beaton

It was created from an alternate frame of one of the photos of the sisters together (second row, far right; third row, far left), crafted by heir-brushing Elizabeth out of the image and meticulously “painting in a left sleeve to the dress.”²

During my research, I came across an outtake from William Edward Kilburn's royal family photo session: a carbon print sourced from a catalog of Queen Victoria’s private negatives. Unedited.

Photograph by William Edward Kilburn

Queen Victoria is far from “horrid”— her eyes do not appear to be closed; rather, she seems to be gazing down, lovingly, at one of her daughters.

Perfectly imperfect.

1. Queen Victoria, Journal entry, 17 January 1852, in Queen Victoria's Journals, RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) (Princess Beatrice's Copies).

2. Roy Strong, Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 96.