My gut reaction to the latest Royal scandal in Great Britain was dismissive: so a snapshot of Princess Catherine was photoshopped: the Horror. But this was just a bi-product of my long-standing lack of interest in the UK’s peculiar institution and a hangover from so many of my female acquaintances reacting to the death of Princess Diana as if their own families had suffered the equivalent of the Cheshire home invasion. The current episode is important for the ethics lesson it teaches, although you would think that this particular lesson would have been learned by the Windsors a long time ago. Did the royal family not watch “The Crown”?
The Prince and Princess of Windsor released the first official photo of Catherine since her abdominal surgery two months ago, a Mother’s Day snapshot allagedly taken by Prince William. Somehow the couple didn’t consider the modern reality that digital sleuths are everywhere, and quickly those annoying common troublemakers discovered that tell-tale signs of photo manipulation were afoot. You can see the various smoking guns above.
A-HA! Deception! What was the photograph hiding? What other photos had been altered to deceive the public? Was the princess really at death’s door? Had the operation rendered her hideous?
The New York Times quoted royal historian Ed Owens, who explained that the manipulated photograph is unsettling for the public because it “brings into question the authenticity” of what is being represented as the state of William and Catherine’ home life. “Like so many millennial celebrities, the Princess of Wales has built a successful public image by sharing with her audience a carefully curated version of her personal life,” he said. “At a time when there is much speculation about Catherine’s health, as well as rumors swelling online about her and Prince William’s private lives, “the events of the last two days have done nothing to dispel questions and concerns.”
This isn’t exactly Mao’s head being shown peaking over the water in the Yangtze river in that infamous photo, but on what was apparently a slow news day across the pond, the snapshot was sufficient to shake the public’s trust—and after so many upheavals in recent decades, that’s something the royal family can’t afford to shake. Directives quickly went out to the media to stop publishing the photo as it had been disavowed. Princess Catherine quickly accepted the blame, saying that like all amateur photographers, she had been tempted to fool around with those newfangled photo editing tools and hadn’t done a very good job of it.
Okaaaay...that explanation didn’t help things. Samora Bennett-Gager, an expert in photo retouching, opined that the photo looked like a composite assembled from multiple images rather than a single image smoothed out with photoshop program. And, like night follows day, the satiriss and meme-makers are out in force with stuff like this:
The lesson is, as it always has been, that leaders and others whose influence and status depend on the public’s trust must not let their guard down, increasingly so in the era of social media, deep fakes, and a general collapse in trust across cultures. Trust damaged, as various old saw state, is notoriously difficult to repair. Risking it with something as trivial as a snapshot is an absurdly careless unforced error.
Ethics Alarms 
I share our host’s apathy for all things “royal family”, so this was kind of a non-starter for me. But having led with that, it does sort of highlight a truism…particularly true for England’s royal family, but probably true in general for most of us.
Veneer.
It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as “a layer of wood of superior value or excellent grain to be glued to an inferior wood.”
And at that point, I could probably just stop, because the readers here are smart enough to take that definition and apply it all over the place. But I’ll go a bit further anyways.
The royal family is obsessed with veneer, because it’s obsessed with appearances. Before the days of computer-based Photoshop – back when Prince Charles and Lady Diana were a thing – we saw gobs of “Photoshopped” photos from them. Veneer. Remember the smiling faces in the photographs? They were the wood of superior value and grain laid over a sham of a marriage, one to which both parties were apparently unfaithful on a regular basis.
The subject photo of Princess Catherine is no different, right? It’s a veneer. Superior parts of pictures have been laid over something of lesser value to present the best possible result, while hiding the failures…the flaws. Hide the things that an adoring public would think unseemly, or cause others to squint, curl their lips a bit, and shake their heads.
The royal family has a long history of veneer that covers a much coarser substructure.
Unfortunately, I live much the same way. Some of you may as well. I present my best side, while doing my level best to cover up the things I don’t want anyone to see or know about. On this field, I’m level with the royal family.
Contrast “veneer” with another word…sincere. I learned this in church years ago, and it’s worth repeating. The word “sincere” derives from two Greek words – “sin” and “cere”. The words translate to “without wax”. Back in the day, when people made pottery, their creations would come out of the oven with imperfections that reduced value, so potters would melt wax, wait until it was setting up, then fill in those imperfections and smooth the surface, resulting in vessels that were more beautiful, more perfect, and more marketable.
But especially talented potters could make objects of such quality that wax was not required. Those items were sin-cere…without wax.
The first step in removing the veneer and living without wax is honesty. Why doesn’t the royal family just take pictures and present them as they are in the first place? Sincere. Do they think people will love them less or pay less attention if something other than perfection is shown? We know they aren’t perfect…we have Charles – now dealing with cancer – and Diana and Meghan Markle among many other in the royal lineage as examples. Trying to hide it only makes it more obvious.
Sorry for blathering on…but I think I learned something important – or at least brought something back to memory – about myself.