British royals
Princess in the tub – Kensington Palace shows photo show
With the “Life Through A Royal Lens” exhibition, Kensington Palace provides an insight into royal life. Photo: Richard Lea-Hair/Historic Royal Palaces/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
For almost 200 years, the British royal family has used photos to present themselves to their people. Some of the royals also like to take the camera themselves.
A princess in the bathtub, the Queen as a hologram: in a new exhibition, Kensington Palace in London offers an extraordinary view of the British royal family.
The “Life Through a Royal Lens” show, open to the public from March 4th, shows the Royal Family in front of, but also behind the camera – or the photographs that were taken.
Hobby of Duchess Kate
In fact, Duchess Kate (40), who regularly publishes her own photos of her children and whose pictures can also be seen, is not the first enthusiastic photographer in the family. Even Queen Elizabeth II herself repeatedly grabbed the camera herself, sometimes she was captured in pictures. Her glamorous sister, Princess Margaret (1930-2002), married photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, who took edgy portraits of her. Among other things, one on which she sits in the bathtub with a diadem and he himself can be seen on the side in the mirror.
An expert from the Historic Royal Palaces Foundation explained at a preview that the royals had published private photos many decades ago in order to show their people a more personal side as family people. “They have always used new technologies early on.”
highlights of the exhibition
This is also evident in a 2004 work by artist Chris Levine – the first hologram of a member of the Royal Family. The Queen was photographed ten thousand times for more than eight seconds. These recordings merged into the hologram, which has different light reflections depending on the perspective and enables a three-dimensional view of the monarch. “It’s incredible how well we know the Queen’s face because we’ve seen pictures of her all our lives,” said the expert.
One of the highlights of the exhibition, which runs until the end of October, is a portrait of Princess Diana that has never been shown publicly before, taken by photographer David Bailey in 1988. Bailey photographed the “Queen of Hearts”, who died in 1997, from the side – her eyes are serious, her clothes are simple but elegant.