Did the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, recently pose with a good face and a broad smile with her three children, also smiling, for her husband’s camera? For a few hours we thought so: this was confirmed by the photo published on the couple’s official Instagram account last Sunday. But now we no longer know what is true about that photograph and what is false. The Princess of Wales acknowledged that she had “edited” the image as “many amateur photographers” do, but the numerous signs of manipulation detected are compatible with techniques for adding or removing elements (faces?) from photographs.
With the dissemination of a manipulated image, Kate Middleton not only deceived her millions of followers, but dragged us into the media around the world, including La Vanguardia, which published the photograph in the digital edition on Sunday and in the printed on Monday. The correction and alert to readers came when the large international photographic agencies indicated that they were removing the image after analyzing it in detail.
Xavier Cervera, chief photography editor at La Vanguardia and associate professor at the UAB, has also analyzed the photograph and believes that it is most likely that parts of different snapshots are combined. Cervera emphasizes that digital editing or post-production of photographs is a common and necessary process, equivalent to the old analog development and that it must serve to adjust the light, saturation or contrast of the photograph. In the journalistic field, this process has “clear red lines and a very basic one is that nothing can be added or removed.”
It is essential, Cervera emphasizes, that “the readers of La Vanguardia know that when they see a photo in this newspaper, everything they see in it is real.” To ensure that this remains the case in these times when AI makes it possible for anyone to modify or create images from scratch so that they look absolutely real, he adds, it will be necessary to further increase verifications on photographs that have not been taken by the La Vanguardia’s own photographers or who do not have the endorsement of large agencies that are governed by strict journalistic criteria.
And this precaution, as the case of Kate Middleton demonstrates, should be applied even when the image comes from apparently reliable sources.
