Testino’s pictures of Princess Charlotte’s christening – which also include a more formal group portrait with the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Charles and Camilla and more – in fact consciously hark back to older traditions on royal portraiture. If all royal families in history had been as sedulously flattered as ours is by Testino there would be no such works of art as Velazquez’s Las Meninas or Goya’s Family of Charles IV, in which royalty are revealed as mortal and fallible human beings. Time was that royalty employed actual artists, and royal portraits were more than PR exercises. Testino is a bland and banal photographer whose images lack any shred of emotional depth. He gives away the fact that, far from casually encountering Testino’s lens, the royalist antidotes to King Charles are in fact enduring the torture of a prolonged pose. George, you can tell, is bored and hating this. Their children are so glossily celebrated that they look like fashion accessories, hired for the day. Their faces lit up by hysterical joy, their hair wispy in the sun, their teeth shining like diamond walls of privilege, and their eyes betraying no signs of thought whatsoever, the Cambridges are robbed of true personality by Testino’s faux-honest glamour shot.
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