Image-Event — Kate Middleton's photo

Images, truth, and post-AI ways of seeing

Let’s christen a new section.

This one is called ‘Image-Event’, after the work of one of my favourite visual anthropologist, Dr. Karen Strassler, who defined an image-event as:

a political process in which an image (or a constellation of related images) crystallizes otherwise inchoate and dispersed imaginings within a discrete and mobile visible form that becomes available for scrutiny, debate, and play as it circulates in public.

In other words, image-events make visible things that are otherwise often unsaid and invisible. They are as much about images as they are making social and political processes an image.

This section will be made of short comments on a current image-event that is shaping our visual landscape. I’ll keep these short, hot, and hopefully, insightful.

Ok, no more theory, let’s dive in.

This week, I want to talk about Kate Middleton FAKE photograph released Sunday on the @princeandprincessofwales Instagram account. Bear with me, this is not about the royals, this is about looking, and truth. If you’ve missed it, here’s the tea. The princess had not been seen in over two months after undergoing surgery, so some people started freaking out and rumouring the worst possible scenarios (aka is she getting a divorce?). This leads us to Sunday, when “she” posted this picture of her and her kids with the caption: “Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months.Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day. C”

©The Prince of Wales, 2024

‘Whew!’ you might think, she’s doing good. Not so fast… look closer… that photo… it’s littered with alterations, covered from pixel to pixel with clumsy edits! Online communities quickly spotted the modifications with various levels of rigorousness (we’ll talk about this in a minute) and the wire companies who distributed the image quickly backtracked and “killed” it. On Monday, Kate tweeted what was supposed to be a corrective, reassuring message: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C”

But the deed was done, and instead of soothing the flames of rumours, the tweet only fanned them, as the edits seemed inconsistent with the claim of a homemade “experiment with editing”.

So, why would this page 6 event be interesting to an anthropologist with a newsletter called On Looking?

I’m not going to go in the details of the photo itself, I’m not a photographer, nor a photo retouching specialist, not even a royal family connoisseur —although I’m actually in the same college as Prince Edward at Cambridge, can you believe it? I heard that his room is still intact and that the windows are bullet proof. Anyway. My interest in this image-event lies in what it reveals of our ways of seeing images online, and what kind of work is involved in doing something that we were taught was quite simple, believing what we see.

Photo and truth have always shared a complicated relationship. The ‘I was there’-ness of photography has guided most of our relationship with images since its invention. From the generational impact of the first photographed war to the social media injunction of “pics or it didn’t happen”, photographs are not just representations of reality, they make things real, if only socially (of course, for as long as photography has existed, so have fakes). The interdependence between what we see and what we believe is a core element of our culture, and has shaped much of our legal, scientific and political systems. What Kate’s photo tells us about this relationship though, is that when you manipulate one, you necessarily affect the other.

On the one hand, months of silence and secrecy have led to putting the image under enhanced scrutiny, and on the other hand, whatever qualities is seen in the image are transferred to its source. Images and reality are like two sides of the same coin. In this case, each alteration in the image is a sign of deceit and secrecy outside of it. There’s also power in deciphering images of a reality we don’t have access to. While it’s in the power of the royals to keep people out of their properties, no one can keep someone else from analyzing a picture. Whatever lack of power one has on reality can be achieved, to a certain extent, through its representation. But more than a photograph supposedly direct relationship with reality, it’s our own learned ways of seeing that lend it its truthfulness, or allow us to question it. And this is when things get interesting.

I think it’s safe to say that most people think of looking as a sense, along with touch, hearing, smell and taste. And as a sense, sight is often framed as a passive, receptive ability that takes in external stimuli to create ‘mental images’. This view is challenged by scholarly work on looking, both in the hard sciences (e.g. cognitive psychology) and in the soft ones (e.g. yours truly, anthropology). Researchers have shown that looking is a very active cognitive process and a power-ridden social one. After years of the internet turning increasingly into a dark forest populated by AI generated images, the frightening accurateness of deep fakes and the ever increasing rise of visual misinformation, looking is less than ever a passive sense and more and more a practice of resistance.

Something that I would pompously call a new ‘culture of visual inquiry’ is emerging. The very little visual literacy that used to be enough to navigate our mediascape is nowadays completely obsolete. The overwhelming quantity of deceitful content online has fostered a need for different, skeptical ways of seeing. The new heroes of this culture are figures of Open Source Investigators and Geo Guessr prodigies, individuals and organisations whose main activity is to develop (often technical) ways of seeing through images, revealing their sources, context or objects.

But a skeptical way of seeing does necessarily constitute well informed visual resistance. The visual analysis of Kate’s photo span a wide range of attitudes toward images as evidence, and their methods vary just as much.

Patrick Witty

, a photographer, editor, and researcher (who also writes a great newsletter here) posted on Twitter the photograph rigorously indicating the altered elements of the image, others have used digital forensic tools to prove the manipulation. At the other end of this spectrum, some comments point to… looser methodologies for proving the facticity of an image. Here are some example:

It's not photoshopped or manipulated...it's an AI image, completely made up. I hope she's fine but it's weird to do a fake photo.

Kids don't smile like this in other group photos. Something looks weird and feels off. It's just sitting so wrong with me. What the heck?

This is fake, most of their fingers are twice their length.

So what’s the difference between highly technical, often technologically mediated, visual resistance and more gut-feeling-y suspicion? Well… I have no idea, but this question leads us to some concluding remarks.

Our visual world is increasingly populated by images we can’t trust. As a result, our ability to rely on sight as a mean to know the world is waning and new ways of seeing have to emerge. This is more than a mere technical thing happening to images. Images make reality shareable, they are crucial to our social fabric, and looking has never been passive, and is even less so today. Our online gaze has to scrutinize, assess, verify, at every turn. Kate’s photo, as an image-event, foretells what our visual lives might look like in a close future. Maybe seeing will become an expertise reserved to a few, while the rest of us live among constant deceit? Maybe visual literacy will have to be part of everyone’s core education, as a prerequisite to navigate our image-saturated world? Maybe our fraught relationship to images will unravel our relationship to reality and truth which will lead to societal collapse and precipitate the end of humanity? 🤷‍♂️

Answering these question is way beyond my pay grade and the scope of this new section, Image-Event, which I hope, you enjoyed.

P.S. Do let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this! I'm committed to focus on visual culture at large with this newsletter and I’d love to know if that’s something you’re into, even if you’re here for the illustration/creative industry stuff. Maybe I could keep this in a separate section you could unfollow? Let me know :)