For once the Windsors, accustomed to adoration and stardom, are the supporting characters of the play. The real protagonists are the photographers who have taken their portraits over the last century, projected their image, given visibility, set the tone of an era and brought them closer to subjects with whom they usually maintain a considerable distance.
The King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace has brought together 160 photos, negatives and documents from 1920 to the present, which are a visual narrative of a century of history of the British monarchy, with its ups and downs, in popularity and controversy, in war and in peace, through the lenses of artists such as Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz, Rankin, Dorothy Wilding and Anthony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon). In the case of the latter, the relationship went beyond the strictly professional, and in 1960 he married Princess Margaret.
An institution as distant as the British monarchy has used photographic portraits as a fundamental mechanism to express power, greatness, the sense of tradition, the embrace of modernity, solidity, security… Images have been an instrument to establish a certain intimacy with the people, not to mention before the arrival of television and the explosion of social networks.
The exhibition, which has just opened and will remain until autumn, not only shows the photos of the royal family but also recreates the entire delicate process behind them, the preparation, the pose, the attitude of the subject, the instructions to convey the image you want to give at that moment, the authors’ notes, the correspondence between them and members of the royal family… Examines the evolution of its status as an artistic expression over time and its impact about culture.
The exhibition, presented essentially in chronological order, begins with the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of “social photography,” and continues through the prosperity and technological advances of the postwar period, when young members of royal families European women competed with movie stars to be caught on camera. Many of the new studios that were created were directed by women, such as Madame Yevonde and Dorothy Wilding (author of the phrase “in my house I put the sun where I want”), who contributed a much more modern aesthetic, even breaking conventions. of the time.
No photographer has had as much influence on the image of the Windsors as Cecil Beaton, who photographed them over six decades. The most famous ones appear in the King’s Gallery exhibition, such as the official ones from the coronation of Elizabeth II and one of the Queen Mother in 1939 in the Palace gardens.
Some of the royal photographers developed close ties with their subjects, but none more so than Anthony Armstrong-Jones, one of the most renowned of the 1950s, whose unpretentious style caught the attention of the Windsors. He became part of the family himself by marrying Princess Margaret. Photos of her that convey considerable intimacy, both before and after marriage, are part of the exhibition.
The final room of the exhibition references the arrival of color and innovations in photographic portraiture over the last forty years, and its widespread recognition as an art form in itself, with examples such as the image of Queen Elizabeth by Andy Warhol, or the contributions of David Bailey, Nick Knight and Anne Leibovitz.
Princess Diana appears in three photographs – one of them with a maternal tone, two in close-up -, Queen Camilla in four and King Charles III in a selection that goes from when he was a chubby child to his coronation last year, passing for his eighteenth birthday. But, after the photographers, the main protagonist is Elizabeth II, through images of her long reign, some more laborious and conscientious than others (Leibovitz was only allowed twenty-five minutes).
the oldest photograph is one of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester; The most innovative are unpublished images of George VI inspecting the damage to the Palace due to the German bombings; and the most endearing is that of four mothers – Elizabeth II, Margaret, Princess Alexandra and the Duchess of Kent – with their babies.
