Kate Middleton and the retouched photo: how are we going to live with image manipulations?

The postcard with one of the most famous photos in history rests like a small treasure in a drawer in my house with the handwritten signature of its author on the back.

Yevgeny Khaldei accompanied the Red Army in the fall of Berlin in the throes of World War II.

On May 2, 1945, one of the three flags with the hammer and sickle carried by this reporter from the official Tass agency was placed at the top of the Reichstag, seat of the German Parliament.

But, immersed in the excitement of the live show, he did not realize that one of the two soldiers who appeared in front of the target with the flag was wearing two watches, undoubted proof of the looting.

That ostentation was considered unnecessary.

As stated in the reproduction that the author himself gave me in 1995, one of those two watches vanished in the laboratory to save the honor of the winner.

Eight decades later, we continue to live daily with images manipulated by institutions.

What's more, the digital age and the huge number of retouching applications on our cell phones have democratized what was only available to a few in 1945. How are we going to live with all this alteration of reality for political purposes?

What tools are going to help us know what is true and what is not?

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Kate Middleton is not the only one: other photographic retouching that was discovered

The debate has jumped into the public sphere following the scandal generated by the digitally manipulated photo in which the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, appears with her children.

In this case, it is an operation carried out from high levels of power.

The consequence has been the loss of credibility, the reputational hole of an institution that, instead of illuminating the truth, has been overwhelmed by a falsehood in its attempt to appease the citizens' desire for knowledge after Middleton was operated on and died. will be left without a public agenda.

Kate Middleton with her children Jorge, Charlotte and Luis, in an image released by Kensington Palace.

It was later confirmed that the image had been manipulated.

Photographic manipulation for spurious purposes, even by official sources, is inherent to the photographic medium itself.

Today, in an attempt to recover lost credibility, new tools are already being designed to mark the traceability of each image.

New legislation in this regard is also already evolving.

In the middle of this debate is the role of journalism and the media, which accompany their news and content with images that underpin truthfulness.

Manipulation has always existed "but the fact that the monarchy, the power, gets involved in the issue is something that crosses all kinds of lines," argues Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, professor of Documentation Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid.

“If we purposely manipulate a photo, we are manipulating history,” he insists.

The professor also alludes to the controversy that surrounded a photo of the King's family in 2022, where the legs of one of the grandchildren of the emeritus king were not visible.

Finally, they released a second take of that scene in which they do see each other.

As in writing, fiction can exist in photography, and in fact it does, but it needs to be recognized, says Sánchez Vigil.

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In this sense, the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) was founded at the end of 2019 by the company Adobe, responsible among others for Photoshop, a well-known image processing program, with the aim of “addressing misinformation and the authenticity of content through large scale” of photos, videos or documents.

The initiative already welcomes hundreds of companies from around the world, ranging from technology to camera manufacturers or media companies.

In the future they hope to generally establish in each image (or document) a label represented by an icon with the letters CR that, when clicked, indicates its origin or the alterations suffered.

This information, something similar to what already accompanies food on its label, is already being implemented in cameras, mobile phones and photo or video editing programs.

That would have made it possible to immediately know the alteration of the photograph released by the British royal family.

“I don't think that the purpose of the photo [of Kate Middleton and her children] is deception, although I could be wrong because history is full of examples,” says Paco Gómez, renowned author of several works of what is known. considers photographic metafiction.

“Also, I think there are no more unmanipulated photos.”

In the midst of the noise, Gómez tries to take the edge off the controversy.

“In my opinion it is only a minimally defective touch-up,” he adds.

More and more media have an area specialized in detecting false content.

Last year, an image from the Reuters agency of the Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isanbayeva, to whom male genitalia had been added to make her pass as a trans athlete, went viral on the networks, as explained by the RTVE verification team.

The photo of the Princess of Wales was removed from the service of the world's main news agencies when the alteration was confirmed.

Digital manipulation specialist Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (United States), concluded that it was not an image generated by artificial intelligence and that it had not been greatly altered, according to an article he published in Time magazine

.

.

That, according to him, agrees with the apologies offered by Kate Middleton, who took responsibility for the manipulation.

But Farid's conclusions did not quell the allegations of conspiracies and rumors on social networks, a world that he describes as “irrational.”

“We live surrounded by doubts,” says Sánchez Vigil, while optimistically predicting that manipulation and artificial intelligence, with which we must live, will end up taking their rightful place.

But Professor Hany Farid warns: “People of bad faith will always be one step ahead of the latest

software

.”

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