It’s not just British royals who edit photos. Manipulated images are everywhere you look

Despite what Jean-Luc Godard once said, cinema is not, in fact, truth 24 times a second. The gnomic Swiss auteur was being typically mischievous; he knew that much of the expressive power of the cinematographic image derives from the tension between its apparently accurate representation of material reality and the fact that the image itself is a product of human artifice and intervention.

That tension goes back to the earliest days of cinema in late 19th-century Paris, where the Lumière brothers had audiences fleeing their seats from the train apparently heading towards them on the flickering screen. A couple of years later, Georges Méliès was taking the same audiences on a fantastical trip to the moon. Everyone understands the moon trip wasn’t real. The trouble is that some still seem to think the train was.

What is true of the moving image is also true of the still one. Recent controversies surrounding hapless British royals have raised some familiar chestnuts about the nature of photography and how we understand it. Many of these ideas have been around for a long time but are being reanimated by developments in generative AI.

[ ‘I do occasionally experiment with editing’: Princess of Wales apologises over edited family portrait ]

Is photography really a “true” representation of the material world? For the news media and photojournalism, the answer has to be an unambiguous yes if they are to maintain their professional reputations. In fact, media organisations have become much more scrupulous than they used to be about how they treat the images they use. Previously it wasn’t uncommon to flip an image or manipulate it in some other way if that helped with a print page layout. Now such practices are deemed unacceptable.

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In the early days of Photoshop, rules were less clear and were unevenly applied; it was common for publishers to “clean up” the pictures they published. They don’t do that any more, but every day they do publish images supplied by PR companies on behalf of their clients. Is the background in that pop-star portrait exactly as it was when the photograph was taken? Unlikely. Did that headshot of the chief executive that came with the corporate press release get a gentle touching up? Very possibly. Did anyone check? Not a chance.

Viewers may not concern themselves too much about any of this, but they do tend to understand that different rules apply to that glossy-magazine cover shot than to the latest frontline footage from Ukraine. The difficulty is that boundaries between news and entertainment, professional and amateur keep shifting. The democratisation of photography and the increasingly sophisticated tools we all have at our disposal mean that everyone’s an SFX expert now.

Which brings us to that doctored photograph, supposedly taken by her husband, of the princess of Wales and her children. The manipulation was so blatant that the only surprise is how long it took for the photographic agencies to issue their “kill” orders. The whole episode reminds us yet again how the Windsor IQ level is living proof that the UK is not a meritocracy.

[ Kate Middleton’s Photoshop fail: Trouble began when the royals confused themselves with celebrities ]

But given that the royals’ relationship with their subjects more often than not resembles that between hostage and kidnapper, you would think that even the Waleses would have understood the concept of a “proof of life” picture, which was what they were essentially proffering in response to fevered conspiracy theories about the princess’s whereabouts.

If, as claimed in the subsequent apology, the whole incident arose from some innocent faffing about on the royal iPhone, then in a perverse way it could even be spun as a signifier of authenticity. When it subsequently emerged that a picture of the late queen with her grandchildren had also been doctored, it was the perfect opportunity to double down.

We’ve all been there, after all. The annoying nephew who keeps ruining the group photo by sticking his tongue out at Granny gets removed with some deft scissor work. The old comrade who you’ve just had garrotted in the Lubyanka is swiftly erased from footage of last year’s party conference.

The difference now is that we are all Georges Méliès and Joseph Stalin. What was previously a complex set of mechanical and chemical processes is now a simple matter of manipulating lines of code, enabled by user-friendly apps. Change that cloudy sky to a blue one. Sharpen up that foreground. Smooth out those wrinkles. Dress everyone in silly uniforms and plonk them on the surface of the moon.

As we enter an era of infinitely reproducible photorealist images, will we finally lose the notion that photography is somehow true? That would be a loss. The paradox at the heart of the mechanical image is what gave it its unique aura. Without that, everything’s a cartoon.