AFP, or Agence France-Presse, was one of the four press agencies to put a kill order on Kensington Palace’s wacky Mother’s Day photo on Sunday. Additional media agencies followed suit, and it all came to a head on Monday when someone signed the Princess of Wales’s initial to an apology for “experiment[ing] with editing” the photo, allegedly taken by her husband. At this point, I don’t think anyone believes that the initial photo was taken by William, nor does anyone believe there even was one “original” photo, nor does anyone believe that Kate actually wrote that apology. I bring up AFP because as they updated their coverage with “Kate’s apology,” they added citations to all of Photoshop fails in the photo:
#UPDATE Catherine, Princess of Wales, on Monday apologised and admitted to editing an official portrait of her released by the palace that prompted AFP and other agencies to withdraw the image https://t.co/orPxfvwdjp pic.twitter.com/UPlxOiJmGJ
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) March 11, 2024
There are tons of people going on deeper dives and falling head first into conspiracies. They have people on British news programs analyzing metadata from the photo too, and the general consensus is that this was not AI – it was an amateurish Photoshop job, possibly on an older photo. Speaking of:
If an intern had produced the sort of editing the Princess of Wales did on her photo of her and her children, they would not get a job, a senior photographic agency executive has told Sky News. Eric Baradat, a photo director at Agence France-Presse (AFP), described Kate’s efforts as “really amateur” and said he and his colleagues “joked this morning, saying if an intern was doing that at AFP, they wouldn’t get a job, no chance at all”.
He told Sky News they soon realised there was “some very strange business going on” with the picture after it was published on Sunday. He said that “the more you look at the picture, the more you enlarge it, it becomes obvious that it’s been manipulated or altered or doctored or whatever you call it, really badly… in a way that is really amateur” and “really badly done”.
As to how the image slipped through their checks, he admitted “doubting images” was one of their responsibilities, “especially nowadays, where no image can be trusted. Basically, no single image can be trusted.” However, all the agencies have “total trust with the material that Kensington Palace is usually sending out”, especially given the picture was one without “political consequences”.
As experienced editors, he said, they should “debunk a lot of the fake [pictures]” and sometimes use software programmes to help identify them. But in the case of the 42-year-old princess’s editing efforts, “you don’t need that”, as “it’s obvious with the human eye, with somebody that knows digital images that there’s not even a need for that”.
A photo without “political consequences”? No, I disagree, although I can understand the sense of complacency within media outlets which usually cover palace-issued photos without question. If it’s a palace-issued photo of one of the royal children on their birthday, that’s something with little to no political consequences, and thus, it would not matter to AFP or Reuters if the image has been edited or manipulated. But we’re talking about the future king’s wife, the future queen consort, the woman who went missing for 70 days while her husband staggered around drunk. There are enormous “political consequences,” and now, with this f–k up, Kensington Palace has zero credibility if and when some bigger sh-t hits the fan.
Here’s a clip about the metadata on the photo, and a now-viral tweet from the Mirror’s social media person, theorizing that Kensington Palace plopped Kate’s Vogue-cover head onto the Mother’s Day photo.
“it shows the image was saved twice on photoshop. once on Friday evening, another time on Saturday morning… both on a Mac computer”
Is there a petition I can sign for Kate Middleton to release the original photo? #PhotoGate pic.twitter.com/SvCy3gWMlI
— Danny Denay #FBPE #GTTO (@DannyDenay) March 11, 2024
my analysis of the kate middleton photo saga is that they took her face from the vogue cover she did years ago and edited it in pic.twitter.com/JLXts08zp5
— Ruby Naldrett (@rubynaldrett) March 11, 2024
Photos courtesy of Kensington Palace, Instar, Cover Images.