When King Charles III was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Saturday, Hugo Burnand, a British photographer, waited in the glittering throne room of Buckingham Palace for the most important moment of his career.
The royal family had commissioned Burnand, 59, to create the official portraits of the newly crowned monarch – to create images that every newspaper in the world wants to publish and that art historians rush to analyse.
But given the complex schedule of the coronation, Burnand would have little time to do it.
On Monday, the royal family announced the results of Burnand’s short session with the newly crowned king, queen and other members of the British monarchy, giving royal observers around the world a chance to assess whether Burnand had lived up to the brief.
Burnand’s pictures depict King Charles III reclining in full regalia, holding the Sovereign’s Orb, a hollow gold sphere made in the 17th century and adorned with a large cross, as well as the Sovereign’s Sceptre. The two items represent the king’s authority and power.
In another photo, the King is shown smiling with Queen Camilla at his side.
In an interview before the coronation, Burnand said he knew the portraits were aimed at a global audience, but wanted them to feel intimate, as if viewers were “perhaps having a one-on-one conversation” with the king. With the portraits, he said, he wanted to create a ‘little bit of theatre’.
Burnand has now joined an exclusive club of photographers who have produced a coronation portrait. For centuries, Britain’s royal family has commissioned artists to paint newly crowned kings and queens, but in 1902 it also began employing photographers for the coronation of King Edward VII.
Several went on to create iconic images of royalty. In 1937, Dorothy Wilding took the portrait of King George VI, with the monarch wearing robes so long that Wilding had to stand 20 feet away to fit the huge garment into the frame.
Two decades later, in 1953, Cecil Beaton photographed Queen Elizabeth II for the first time in the regalia of a monarch, including a heavy crown. In that photo, the Queen appears to be in Westminster Abbey, but Beaton actually photographed her after the ceremony, in front of an artificial backdrop at Buckingham Palace.
On that day, Beaton found the time pressure challenging, later writing in his diaries that he spent the session ‘blasting off and taking shots at a rapid pace’. “I had only a vague idea of whether to take black and white or color, or get the exposure right,” Beaton added.
Paul Moorhouse, a curator who oversaw a 2012 exhibition of royal portraits at London’s National Portrait Gallery, said in an email that Beaton’s images created “a spectacle of monarchy that was deliberately captivating”. Burnand faced a tough challenge to match its impact, Moorhouse added, especially as his photographs had to appeal to younger generations who were more skeptical of the monarchy.
Burnand, who once worked in horse stables and did not become a professional photographer until his late twenties, has a long relationship with both Charles and Camilla, having first met the Queen in the 1990s.
When Charles and Camilla asked Burnand to shoot their wedding in 2005, he initially turned them down, he said. He was on sabbatical in Bolivia at the time and had just been robbed. “I stole all the family’s passports, and our money and my cameras,” he recalled in an email to the palace.
Still, he quickly changed his mind and the wedding turned out to be a life-changing moment. Burnand said he no longer had to wait for the phone to ring with job offers; now he could pick and choose jobs.
In addition to his other royal engagements, Burnand photographed the wedding of Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales in 2011, receiving praise for an intimate shot of the newlyweds surrounded by pageboys and bridesmaids (he only had 26 minutes for that shoot). Burnand said he and his stepmother, Ursy Burnand, used candy during the session to coax the kids into behaving.
During the recent interview, Burnand said he hated having his own portrait done, which helped him empathize with his sitters. He often discussed ideas with his subjects before a shoot to make them feel part of the process, he added, but declined to reveal details about his conversations with Charles and Camilla.
He said he took other steps to ensure he got the best results for this event, including spending weeks studying footage from past coronations and creating mock-ups with stand-ins.
But even with such preparation, Burnand said great photos ultimately depend on luck, especially when the photographer has a king’s schedule to work around.