Princess Kate, photographs, and the great thirst for significance 

When Photogate, or Kategate, or whatever we end up calling it, first became news, I remember taking one look at social media and thinking: you people have lost your damn minds. An anodyne photograph of the Princess of Wales and her children was issued to the press agencies by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day. First, the amateur sleuths of Twitter spotted some visual inconsistencies in the image. Then the conspiracy theorists came out to play. And before long the major press photo-agencies had withdrawn the photo, with a great show of fastidiousness, from circulation.  

Earnest articles were produced describing it as a watershed moment in the history of the Palace’s relationship with the public; as a catastrophic PR own goal that would take years to recover from. To which the answer is, er… maybe? Given, it isn’t a good look for the Palace to put out a digitally altered photograph without admitting it – though it’s questionable how many photographs reach us unedited anyway, these days, what with the ubiquity of filters and cunning crops and digital blemish removers.