A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography by Anne M. Lyden (review)

In the Christmas photo that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge released in December 2015, William and Kate strike a casual pose on the grounds of Kensington Palace, a cheeky George beside them and a shoeless Charlotte in the Duchess’s arms. The photo, taken by Chris Jelf, is meant to convey the young royal family’s playfulness, their like-ability, their relatability, indeed, even their relative thrift. (Charlotte is wearing the same dress in which she appeared in earlier photographs.) The artifice lies in the seeming lack of artifice. It is an entirely self-conscious—but none-the-less effective—public relations exercise.

Given the increasingly scripted nature of our encounters with British royalty, the publication of A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography could not be more timely. Edited by Anne M. Lyden, International Photography Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, with contributions by Lyden, Jennifer Green-Lewis, and Sophie Gordon, this perceptive and handsomely-produced volume—published in tandem with the exhibition staged at the Getty Center in 2014—assigns Queen Victoria and Prince Albert a key role in pioneering many of the photographic practices that have been honed by the royal family today. In the contributors’ views, Victoria and Albert came to see photography as vital to shoring up the monarchy and to projecting their soft power at home and abroad.

The invention of photography was announced in early 1839, less than two years into Queen Victoria’s reign. Initially, Victoria admired this “curious” new medium, with its “aristocratic and scientific associations,” but proved reluctant to sit for portraits herself (vii, 13). At first glance, after all, photography seemed far less desirable than painting, especially if the goal was the production of a royal image that represented more the ideal than the real. Some of the most endearing scenes described in A Royal Passion involve recounting the Queen and Prince Albert’s first awkward encounters with the medium during the 1840s and early 1850s. When Albert ventured to the studio of William Constable in Brighton in 1842 to sit for his first royal portrait, for example, the weather did not cooperate and so he had to return to the studio a few days later (108). Some ten years on, when Victoria agreed to be photographed with five of her children, the “resulting image,” according to Gordon, “upset her so much that she attempted to scratch out her own face on the daguerreotype plate” (109). Needless to say, through the 1850s, virtually all photographs of the royal family were intended for private rather than public circulation.

With time, however, Victoria and Albert embraced photography as a tool of the monarchy, especially in forwarding the idea of the royal family as moral and harmonious, the upholders of middle-class values. In 1860, just a year before Albert’s death, the Queen first conceded to the publication and sale of photographs of the royal family (107). Subsequently, Victoria relied on photography to project herself as a wife, mother, and widow, damping down some of the more subversive aspects of female rule. As the Queen now realized, there was nothing like a photograph to establish a false sense of intimacy between herself and her subjects. Of course, the fact that photography itself was becoming more commercialized facilitated this process. The invention in the 1850s of the inexpensive carte de visite—a photograph affixed to a small card—ensured that new classes of subjects had the means to purchase images of the royal family. That, by century’s end, such images could be doctored also made them more appealing. As Gordon reports, by the late nineteenth century it was common for photographic studios to “manipulate the negatives of their sitters to remove stray hair, reduce waist sizes, and smooth out wrinkles”—all services of which Victoria “took full advantage” in her Diamond Jubilee portraits (123).

To describe this book as...