The kind of pictures I like…

Old royal photos are a bit problematic. The vast majority of them were posed and thought over quite a bit before hand. The usual look was totally expressionless. The intention was to look serious and dignified. Queen Victoria looked downright angry in some of her photos, but not in a passionate or emotional way. Her descendants were much the same. There were smiles, occasionally, but they usually look unnatural.

The British royals seem more serious than some of the other families. There are a lot more candid pictures of the early-twentieth century Romanovs than the Windsors. Part of it may be that with the demise of the Russian monarchy and the death of many members of the Imperial family came the publication of many personal photos. Perhaps the Windsors have large archives of informal photos hiding somewhere in a box in Buckingham Palace.

Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Romanov playing

But I doubt that. Queen Mary, like Queen Victoria, was a big believer in looking proper and dignified when being photographed. Plus Nicholas II was really into photography and new technology in general. His daughters had cameras and kept their own photo albums, some of which survived the Revolution. What I love about the above photo is that you can see expressions on the girls’ faces. You can see them as they were in real life, not as they tried to present themselves. They’re getting a little dirty, and Anastasia is enjoying it. Photos like this are sort of haunting, though, when you remember what the future had in store for them.

Compare to this formal photo. You can't tell as much about them from this.

One of the things I love about Princess Diana is that she wasn’t afraid to show emotion in front of the camera. Admittedly, part of it had to do with her living in the age of paparazzi where she was going to be photographed all the time, without having time to work out how she wanted to be seen. But still other contemporary royals didn’t quite show the emotion of Princess Diana. She always seemed real. Even in posed photos.

William and Harry are like their mother, which is good. From now on, the problem of stiff and unemotional royal photos should be over. Even Queen Elizabeth is much more open about her emotions now and ten times more human-looking than Queen Mary ever was. But from a historical standpoint, it’s hard seeing so many photos that don’t tell you anything about the person in the picture. If I was a historian, I would publish a whole book of royal photos I could dig up where you can see personality, complete with commentary about the person, place, and time. As it is I’ve been getting my photos off of Flickr and other sites, where you have to dig through dozens of boring photos to find interesting ones. And half the time they’re only interesting because of the silly hats pictured and not because of the facial expressions present.

Pictured: Silly hats.

Some of the boring photos are worse than portraits. Even though royal portraits rarely show any emotion (or what the sitter really looked like) at least there were pretty costumes.

Some of the posed photos have those too.

Princess Mary Doesn't care how pretty she looks