Can storytellers learn anything from the Princess of Wales’s Mother’s Day photo debacle?

A picture scandal is worth a thousand words

EDIT: Since I wrote this, the Princess of Wales has released a heart-wrenching video sharing her cancer diagnosis. This article aims to add dialogue around various aspects of popular culture and creativity, and has therefore been left unaltered to reflect the moment we were in when it was written.

For a couple of days last week, everyone seemed to be talking about the Princess of Wales’s photo editing skills.  For anyone who has somehow missed this, the princess has been absent from public life for most of this year, while recovering from abdominal surgery. She released a very innocuous-looking photo of her posing with her three children on Mother’s Day in the UK, but it soon became clear that the image had been digitally manipulated, prompting a number of high-profile news agencies and media outfits to issue a very ominous-sounding ‘kill order’ on the photo, meaning it was not to be trusted as authentic or used further. A few days later the princess herself made a statement of apology, in which she took the blame for the furore, saying, ‘Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing… I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.’

Perhaps the royals hoped that would be the end of it. However, since then, interest in this story has only intensified, triggering all sorts of questions around the royal family, their purpose, their ethics, photo manipulation in general, etc. etc. For most curious onlookers, this is essentially a real-life mystery story. Why has Kate not been seen for so long? Is she still unwell? Why did she put out a photo with such obvious digital manipulation? And why did she release a statement saying she’d edited it herself when she has plenty of staff available to help her? And now, after so much speculation, why so little comment? Why not release the original photo? How many other photos have been altered? What is really going on? Unwittingly, the royals have set up a modern-day mystery to entice all amateur sleuths to the table. But is there anything more for us to learn here?

Intrigue

The intense intrigue stems from the fact that there are many interesting questions around this scenario, and a distinct lack of satisfactory answers to any of them. Therefore, everyone has been having a field day speculating and making increasingly wild guesses as to what is going on. For a fiction author, this is exactly where you would want your audience to be across most of your story: full of curiosity, examining each clue in detail, unsure of the answers so compelled to keep reading. And although the people involved in this real-life mystery must only wish it would go away, now the mystery is afoot, it can’t be undone. However, while in fiction the playout must happen and the mystery must be addressed, in order to leave readers satisfied, the royals have long held to the motto ‘never complain, never explain’, so they might just get away with leaving this one unresolved. The risk is that this could lead to ongoing mistrust and growing disenchantment with the family - just as an unsatisfactory or unresolved fiction story will leave a reader disinvested and unlikely to pick up another book by the same author. 

Authenticity

The royal family tried to sell us a story through an image, but because they weren’t upfront about manipulating it, they lost people’s trust. This foreshadows a future in which it may become increasingly difficult for celebrities and the elite to live cloistered and self-contained lives, while expecting their audience to be content with carefully curated titbits. Nowadays people expect to see behind the curtain, although this is a murky business. No person can live their life continually trying to satisfy the expectations of everyone else, and there are surely some essential human rights to privacy that need urgent and ongoing consideration. However, in a world reeling from the rapid advances of AI, digital manipulation and fake news, modern-day audiences are going to demand authenticity and honesty in everything from the way goods are made and news is filtered to the stories they hear. How long before the first scandal of a bestselling story that turns out to be generated by AI? And will there be a point when we get used to that, and don’t see it as a problem any more? Is this something to be worried about - because if so, we need to invest in valuing and promoting authenticity, both in ourselves and our stories, and in the way we go about promoting and selling our books.

Human vulnerability and connection 

I’m not an ardent royalist, but nor do I have too much against the Windsors (with the exception of Prince Andrew, who seems pretty shady these days). I’m English by birth so I probably have a natural appreciation of pageantry and a little band of the King’s Guard quick-marching through my veins, but I’m also capable of looking at a golden Cinderella carriage and wondering why we’re cheering so hard for these individuals when it all feels slightly absurd. And although my natural reaction is ‘leave them alone’ when the conversation around them goes past a certain point, I realise it’s not that simple. This is a powerful, complex, seriously troubled family, who look like an anachronism in the twenty-first century. However, they also offer a sense of safety in a rapidly changing world, a welcome continuity of culture and tradition. And, if they can use their fortunate circumstances well, they might become arbiters of important change (such as Prince William’s work on the Earthshot Prize). The next generation’s ability to continue working as a constitutional monarchy will depend on how much they are able to connect with people and keep proving that the monarchy is valuable, when, despite their extraordinary heritage, they have as many vulnerabilities, flaws and strengths as everyone else. So what can authors learn here? Well, in a world oversaturated with content, us novelists might become equally vulnerable. We will need to be adaptable and aware of cultural concerns as we consider how our stories can be of value in this too-much-of-everything world. The fervent hope is that, since storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human, readers will continue to seek out the deep connections that novels can offer us, our characters and our worlds.

How have you responded to this news story, and what does it leave you thinking about? It’s given me pause for thought, because when the photo edits were pointed out to me, I could only see approximately 50% of the suggested problems if I squinted, and had I just come across the photo I would have been none the wiser as to whether it had been digitally altered at all. The changes were only picked up because the manipulation was obvious to the expert eye, and yet with the advances of AI we are going to have to be prepared for much, much more convincing depictions of events and people in faked or manipulated scenarios. What will that do to our collective psyche? There is plenty worth talking about here, and much more still to come.