The post mortem continues so many days after Kate Middleton shared her first image with her three children post the mystery surgery. Princess Charlotte’s sleeve is all wrong; it is March but the trees in the background are in full bloom, Kate’s zipper, the boys’ sweaters, “anatomical weirdness” --- these are just some of things that have been pointed out by the “Kate Truthers”. Agencies put out a “kill notice” on the photograph and finally, an apology was issued by the Princess of Wales herself. The whole thing is so ludicrous that it must be couched in apparent excruciating concern for the physical and mental well-being of the royal family member in question.

Pretty please

Let’s just say that all Kate Middleton wanted to do was put out an image of a happy mother with her happy children. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were the first royals to enjoy what was in their time the new medium of photography. The photographs were, for the longest time, for private viewing only, but even then they were composed to convey a certain message. For instance, in most of those taken during the lifetime of Prince Albert, the queen was represented as an adoring wife gazing at her husband or a devoted one, holding the photograph of her husband. There are photographs of her with her children too. One such photograph taken by William Kilburn exists to date; in it, the images of her five children are clear but her own face has been scratched out. The backstory goes that the queen was displeased by the unflattering image of herself and “scratched out her face on the plate”.

The Afterlife

When the queen died in 1901, she had a collection of 20,000 photographs. After Prince Albert’s death, she used photographs to capture and convey her mourning to her subjects. There are photographs of her in widow’s weeds sometimes alone, sometimes with her children, many a time with Albert’s bust in the background. It was she who started the trend of mourning portraits in England. When the first royal wedding, that of the future King Edward VII to Princess Alexandra of Denmark took place in 1863, the queen was still in mourning and in seclusion. She did not participate in the wedding ceremony. Eventually, a photograph of the newly marrieds was released to the British public --- there was a bust of Prince Albert in the background and Princess Alexandra was shown holding up a framed photograph of him. And though she never set foot in India, it is a photograph that established for one and all the queen’s identity as Empress of India. The photograph was taken by W&D Downey and the ivory Travancore Throne was inserted into it to convey the Indian connection.