Princess Diana was one of the most photographed women in the world, with her image endlessly reproduced in her life and since her death. But today, a previously unseen picture of the late Princess has been shown for the first time, ahead of its inclusion in a new exhibition at Kensington Palace.
Life Through a Royal Lens, which opens to the public on Friday, March 4, features a striking black and white image of Diana taken by photographer David Bailey in 1988 for the National Portrait Gallery. Several images from the sitting were shown at the gallery but this particular portrait, showing Diana looking thoughtfully to one side, was kept back by Bailey until now.
Explaining that many of the other images Bailey took during the sitting were “much more standard presentations of Diana, warmly looking at the camera,” Kensington Palace curator Claudia Acott Williams tells T&C about the new image, “This for me is the most powerful. It shows her in a completely different light...In a way, her retreating from the camera a bit and showing something that’s a bit more stoic was actually her doing something completely different.” Bailey was also a bold choice for the Princess, and she selected him over several established royal photographers.
Another rare image shows Queen and Prince Philip posing ahead of their Platinum wedding anniversary in November 2017. While a more formal image from the sitting with Matt Holyoak was released, this picture was considered too personal to officially mark the moment. It shows the late Duke of Edinburgh laughing while the Queen looks affectionately up at him. “I think this speaks to their relationship with each other,” Acott Williams says. “This is them as a married couple; as husband and wife, not just monarch and consort. It’s such a subtle difference from the existing photographs and yet it tells us a different story, the chemistry between these two as long into their marriage as it was.”
The oldest image in the exhibition is a reproduction of a photograph of Prince Albert taken in March 1842 by William Constable. Considered to be the earliest surviving image of a member of the royal family, Acott Williams points out how it showed that “Albert was very interested in technological progress and very cognizant of the fact that the royal family needed to align themselves with forces of progress.”
Demonstrating how this thinking has continued up until the present day, the newest picture shown will always be the latest message posted on Instagram by the royal family, with a screen showing their social media account attached to the wall. “They were quite quick to see that Instagram was going to be a really important tool for their communication,” Acott Williams notes of the modern royals. “It allowed them to share images very quickly and with a huge audience without any kind of mediator—the press—between them, but for them to attribute their own messaging.”
The exhibition combines some of the most iconic and widely-shown images of the royals with more personal, rarely reproduced pictures. It also features formal official portraits alongside relaxed family ones. There is the famous photograph of Diana shaking hands with AIDS patient Ivan Cohen in 1987, the instantly-recognizable portraits of the young Queen taken by Cecil Beaton, an intimate image of infant Princess Elizabeth taken by her father and, of course, a picture of Princess Margret in the bath with a tiara on.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge selected images of their three children taken in 2019 by Kate to showcase how they wanted their family to be seen. “This is a mother’s picture of her child as well as a future queen’s picture of the heir,” Acott Williams says of the image of Prince George in his England football shirt. “There is an ease that you would never get if a professional photographer was taking that picture. But it also has allowed her to create a degree of privacy as well.”
The exhibition, which has been put together by charity Historic Royal Palaces, ends with 50 pictures taken by the public. Almost 1,000 submissions were narrowed down to 25 which will be shown when the exhibition opens and another 25 to be shown starting half way through.
Life Through a Royal Lens opens at Kensington Palace on 4 March 2022 until October 30 2022 and is included in palace admission. For more information visit hrp.org.uk.
Town & Country Contributing Editor Victoria Murphy has reported on the British Royal Family since 2010. She has interviewed Prince Harry and has travelled the world covering several royal tours. She is a frequent contributor to Good Morning America. Victoria authored Town & Country book The Queen: A Life in Pictures, released in 2021.
