Photoshop for the ages — The Princess diaries

We’re living in a time where badly faked realities are quickly spotted, writes Aspasia Karras

Given the global drama and handwringing that’s prevailed in the news regarding the Photoshopped Mother’s Day portrait of certain royals this week, I conclude that we may as well be living among the Tudors. Perhaps I should work on my doublet and mutton sleeves for my next Instagram post. We’re not as far removed from Henry

VIII as we might imagine.

The royal portrait has always played an outsized role in the whispered negotiations and horse trading for power, influence, territory, diplomacy, propaganda and titular exchanges by way of royal wives and husbands.

Back in the day, various dynasties solidified their territorial ambitions and peace treaties on the strength of these royal portraits that would be sent on before the proposed nuptials of royal pawns as a kind of visual testament to the goods on offer.

Spies and ambassadors would be dispatched behind the scenes to establish how true to life these images really were.

Henry VIII sent his trusted court painter Hans Holbein to paint the “mare of Flanders” Anne of Cleves before he accepted the proposal to make her wife number three.

Holbein was apparently famous for his documentary work. It was very true to life — but in this case, it transpired that he may have embellished the truth a little because on meeting Anne in the flesh, after she had travelled for almost a year to get to her King, Henry had a great disappointment and couldn’t rise to the occasion.

The marriage was swiftly annulled and Anne of Cleves became his “sister wife” who managed to keep her head on her shoulders, which, given his proclivity for swift retribution by way of axe, was testament that there must have been more to her than a pretty face.

I’m sure that a swift beheading crosses many a swindled Tinder dater’s mind when they find that Photoshop is not their friend. One can sympathise with Henry, it was like a Tudor date gone horribly wrong, where the picture and reality are miles apart and the person in front of you isn’t what was promised on their dating profile.

Instead, the older, grubbier, less svelte version is now making themselves known on the first date. It’s hard to come back from all that aggrieved disappointment.

I often wonder why people bother to Photoshop at all. I’ve been known to go down the rabbit hole on people’s profiles as they throw down every filter known to technology to create the weird, waxy, thinner, version of themselves — blemish free, entirely symmetrical, with a sprinkling of fairy dust that sparkles around their head as they move through their improbable lives. What must happen when Henry finally gets to meet you “In Real Life”? Wilting — that’s what.

Obviously we live in truthiness — where not much objective reality holds sway with the powers that be. The smoke and mirrors of Hollywood are now the standard issue life and times of every Jo Blog.

Even the so-called TikTok reality stars are playing thick and fast with our credulity. I have no doubt that they all live in a musical, where song, dance and witty repartee is peppered with constant insightful, factchecked, yet pithy observations about the state of the world. Or maybe not. And their reality is just plain old Anne of Cleves after a very, very long journey.

You have to feel for Kate though. The Princess of Wales took her well-earned sabbatical from a life spent perfecting perfection, glad handing in a fog of hairspray and curling tongs and being the embodiment of a “good” princess while that other “bad” one moved to Hollywood to perfect her own PR campaign which was badly backfiring.

The “good” princess had some scheduled surgery and went into hiding till after Easter. I mean, she had communicated this all as per her courtiers and public circular — only to become mired in conspiracy theories, dramatic search campaigns, global discussions of her whereabouts and now snooty cancellations of her botched Mother’s Day picture by the press agencies.

Because, you know, somebody still has standards about the truth — the Photographic Agency — the place where the entirely objective news photographer captures actual reality and acts only as a kind of pure, highminded mediator between hard facts and the camera roll (or at least a version of all the reality they choose to see).

They’d have us trust that at least their sanctioned photographs are not the total, wholesale reinvention of the AI and Photoshop swamp we all wade through daily. This explains why it’s become a status thing for celebrities to post their photographic agency red carpet pictures with the watermark front and centre. It’s a kind of post-truthy stamp of authenticity. “You see? This is really what I look like. The press agency says it’s so. Also the press agency actually bothered to take this picture of me, so I must be famous. And real. And famous. Famously real.”

I believe the most painted and photographed royal in all of history was Prince William’s great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. She was a master at self portrayal — larger than life. Her various guises — romantic, maternal, grieving, regal, strict, all powerful — fuelled an empire with image juice. I once saw one of her actual mourning dresses in a museum in Bath. I remember thinking — gosh, she must have been a very short, very round dumpling of a Queen. You’d never know for the Photoshop.