#Royalty free memory pictures professional#

A picture by John Swannell shows Diana laughing with her sons and another by Mario Testino has Charles doing the same Rankin gets a laugh out of the Queen, and so on it goes.

#Royalty free memory pictures professional#

On the evidence of this exhibition, there is, for instance, a durable sub-genre of laughing royals: Lord Lichfield, the Queen’s cousin and another professional photographer, has the family gather before the camera and a television showing a Marx Brothers film so as to capture their laughter. This occurs with great regularity, but amazement is expressed each time: “They are just people, after all!” or rather: “They are also people, after all!”Įven the photographers seem to find this remarkable, and they presumably know better. We may perhaps see an institution that is running out of time, being overwhelmed by an image culture it has successfully exploited for over a century.įrom under the vast weight of robes, palaces, traditions, duties and expectations, their humanity is briefly revealed. We see the work of famed photographers who have heeded the royal summons we might notice some uncomfortable matters discreetly passed over. We see a continual shuttling between grand assertions of rank and dignity – palaces, gilded carriages, fine horses and robes, crowns, furs and diamonds – and more casual moments in which they reveal their apparently more human side. A display of photographs of the royal family now on show at their Kensington Palace in London gives a partial but telling view of the royals’ persistent visual allure. It would be better, perhaps, to acknowledge their existence and their artificiality at once, to say ‘Baron’ Cruddas, ‘Lord’ Offord of Garvel or ‘Dame’ Andrea Leadsom.įor the artifice extends back from noble twig and aristocratic branch through royal bole and root. What is a democrat to do with such titles? Tempting though it may be to wish them away (if I remember correctly, the Morning Star published a curt notice of the marriage of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer), this is to deny them their undoubted power. That succinct formulation may find an echo in our present, knee-deep as we are in newly minted lords, baronesses and knights, elevated mostly for their services to the Conservative Party. “Honours dishonour,” Gustave Flaubert once wrote, confronted with the fabulously pompous, corrupt and incompetent regime of the 19th-century Second French Empire.