Kate’s grandpa behind her love of photography
THE Duchess of Cambridge has revealed it was her grandfather who taught her photography and helped change royal history.
She learned to take pictures when she was a girl and regularly visited her paternal grandad
Peter Middleton.
Kate, 40, has become an accomplished photographer and taken control of her family’s image to a new level.
She has limited most publicly available pictures of her children, Prince George, eight, Princess Charlotte, six, and Prince Louis, three, to shots she has taken.
It has meant there are fewer photos of them than of previous generations of the Royal Family, but the pictures are often more intimate and relaxed because their mother has taken them.
The Duchess, who wrote a dissertation about the author
Lewis Carroll’s photos of children when she was a student at St Andrews University, has submitted a picture of each of her children to Life Through a Royal Lens.
The new exhibition at Kensington Palace focuses on the Royal Family’s relationship with photography.
She chose three images of the children, including George in an England football shirt, for the show and told staff at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages the parts of the palace open to the public, how she got interested in the artform.
Claudia Acott Williams, curator at Historic Royal Palaces, said: “Her grandfather was a very good photographer.when she was a child, he would show her his slides. It was him who taught her how to take photographs.”
Mr Middleton, an RAF and then commercial airline pilot, died aged 90 on November 2, 2010, just days before Kate andwilliam announced their engagement.
After his death, his family praised his huge enthusiasm and described his passion for hobbies including sailing, carpentry, writing and photography.
They revealed thatwilliam had joined Kate and the whole family at his 90th birthday party.
The second in line to the throne and his then girlfriend visited Mr Middleton again after their return from Kenya, where William proposed to her in October 2010.
Ms Acott Williams said Kate’s dissertation on the photographs taken of children by Carroll would have been an excellent preparation for the Duchess’s approach to capturing George, Charlotte and Louis on camera. Carroll was better known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and sequel Through the Lookingglass than his snaps.
And in November 2004 Kate, then a fourth year art history student at St Andrews, wrote to the Lewis Carroll Society, asking for help. She said: “I am interested in looking at Carroll’s representations of ‘the child’ and whether his photographs support or conflict our notions of childhood.”
She exchanged emails with Edward Wakeling, author of numerous books on Carroll, before submitting her dissertation, entitled Angels from Heaven:
Lewis Carroll’s Photographic Interpretation of Childhood.
Life Through a Royal Lens, which opened to paying visitors at Kensington Palace on Friday, looks at how the monarchy has used the power of photography to project and often try to control its image from the reign of Queenvictoria until the modern day.
The exhibition shows that the idea is by no means new. Queen Alexandra regularly had her images retouched to give her face a more youthful appearance. Queen Victoria smudged out her face on the negative of an 1852 portrait of herself with her eldest five children because she thought it unflattering.
For most of the rest of her life she carried around with her the first royal photograph, taken of Prince Albert in 1842.
By 1891 it had faded away but Victoria had a photo taken of the ghostly image which survives and is seen in the exhibition.
Among the 130 shots are a previously unseen smiling portrait of the Queen and Prince Philip, taken in 2017.Their disgraced son Prince Andrew features as a boy and there are a handful of photos of Harry and Meghan.
Ms Acott Williams said: “Ever since Queenvictoria and Prince Albert first embraced the revolutionary new technology of photography, the medium has shaped how the world views the British monarchy.”
‘Shaped how the world views royals’