Princess of Wales photo controversy shows we’ve been thinking about edited images the wrong way
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Mercredi, mars 13, 2024
Experts have warned of a coming “infocalypse”, and of the consequences for this year’s bumper crop of elections.
Key Points:
- 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 response to this controversy can help us think about the wider challenge of manipulated images and video.
A royal history of faked photographs
- 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.
- Some of these composite photographs, such as Henry Peach Robinson’s image Fading Away, were controversial, because of both their subject matter and technique.
- Before it became possible to directly print photographs in newspapers in 1880, there was a widespread practice of copying photographs into drawings, embellishing them by adding colour and improving the composition.
- When half-tone printing was introduced, journalists continued to tweak their photographs, with one editor of a photography magazine in 1898 boldly stating that “everybody fakes”.
Solving a social problem
- Outside of journalistic contexts, we don’t have strong social norms against adding colour to photographs.
- The problem here isn’t that photo editing software fundamentally undermines our trust in photographs.
- But the fact that we have those standards, and press organisations were able to respond accordingly, shows we have the tools to manage this problem.
- But this is a social, not just a technological, problem.
Joshua Habgood-Coote has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 818633).