[ Crowd cheering ] ♪♪ -On the 29th of July, 1981, more than half a million people lined the streets of London.

Hundreds of millions more were tuned into their TVs across the world.

Unfolding in front of their eyes was a piece of royal theater -- the wedding between Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, and Lady Diana Spencer.

♪♪ Everything about this occasion was epic.

If there's one thing the royal family do well, it's weddings -- not necessarily marriages, but weddings for sure.

And this was a spectacle beyond imagination.

It was a very public, yet also a personal moment for the royal couple.

The weight of expectation on their shoulders was immense.

Of course, people weren't so fussed about the constitutional aspects of it all.

What they were in love with was the romance of it.

I remember going to the hairdresser with a little friend for her to get a "Lady Di" haircut.

We couldn't get enough of the bride and her dress.

After all that anticipation, the ceremony itself was a bit of an anticlimax.

The bride and groom seemed shy and awkward.

Where had all the romance gone?

But let's fast-forward the wedding video to when the couple emerged onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

The TV cameras were panning all up and down the Palace and along the long line of members of the royal family, when suddenly, Charles and Diana stole a little kiss.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] Ooh, job done.

He was everything we'd hoped for.

It was what the world saw in the papers the next morning, and it was a photographer with his long lens who captured that moment and who created one of the most celebrated images of the 20th century.

Once, the ideal of the monarchy was spread through fairy tales.

Now it's spread through photographs.

I'm going to open up the royal photo album to see how, for 200 years, the British monarchy has used photography as its very own superpower.

From creating a new sovereign to affairs of the heart, majestic moments to everyday life, when monarchy wants to send a message, it uses a photograph.

I'll find out how to sit for a photo like Queen Victoria... You've just got to be as still as possible.

-Indeed.

-...rummage through the most photogenic clothes in the royal wardrobe...

This is just the raciest little dress.

...and hear behind-the-scene stories from the photographers who captured these unforgettable images.

-All of a sudden, I managed to capture.

I was so proud about it.

It's by harnessing the power of photography that the British monarchy has survived.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] A photograph is never just a photo.

It always has a meaning that goes deep beneath the surface, and nobody knows this better than the royal family themselves.

♪♪ -There are many kinds of royal photographs, but there's one that more than any other, you have to get exactly right -- the portrait of a monarch.

♪♪ It's not just about lighting or composition, but telling a story.

And in Spring 1953, preparations were under way for the most important royal photograph ever -- the coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

By the 20th century, monarchs in Britain no longer really had any political power.

They no longer ruled, but they reigned, and that meant that their job was to be a symbol for Britain, for its hopes and dreams.

Photographs of the newly crowned queen would go all over the world, and they contained a message about how Britain wanted to see itself and how it wanted to be seen.

And in the early 1950s this was desperately important.

In the years after the war, the country had lost its mojo.

There was rationing and shortages.

Britain was skint.

The coronation was a chance to show the world that Britain was still a player, that it could still prance proudly up on the world's stage.

And it was a chance to show everybody at home that tradition still existed, that everything was going to be alright.

Elizabeth's coronation was designed to lead the country into a brave, new Elizabethan age, or at least give it a good party.

It was time to polish up the gems, hose down the horses, and dig out the bunting.

[ Crowd cheering ] The new queen's coronation image would be like a sales pitch for her reign.

The stakes were high.

For centuries, the painted portrait had done this job of introducing the new monarch, and the work had been done by the very best portrait painters.

These were timeless works that defined the rule of kings and queens.

Compared to them, black and white coronation photographs had been a little lacking in sparkle.

Whoever took Elizabeth's picture would need seriously to up the ante.

No pressure, then.

♪♪ The man handpicked for the job was Cecil Beaton... ♪♪ ...photographer to the stars.

Beaton had been working with the royal family since the 1930s.

I've come to the Victoria and Albert Museum to uncover the secrets of his unique style.

Susanna, what kind of a photographer was Beaton known as before he entered royal circles?

-By the time Beaton started photographing the royal family, he was already hugely famous.

He'd photographed everyone from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali to Marlene Dietrich and Coco Chanel.

So he was really the top, top portrait photographer in Britain.

So, this is a picture of Queen Elizabeth, or Queen Mum, as we think of her today, inside Buckingham Palace, and you can see straight away that he's highly influenced not by previous photographers, but by painted examples of royal portraits, so, Gainsborough and Winterhalter -- the wonderful sparkling, romantic portraits of queens and princesses of history.

-When you think of the Queen Mother, in, say, her wedding photo, it's not a good look.

She looks kind of -- With respect, she looks a bit sort of dowdy, and then he's transformed her, hasn't he?

-The lighting, for example, in this image, beautiful, soft, romantic shafts of light coming through the window, but you can see here his big studio light that's actually shining directly on her face so that we see her features beautifully.

-And what did he do with the young princesses?

How did he deal with them?

-Beaton photographed Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, our Queen Elizabeth, on several occasions, one of which was 1945.

And you can see here a group of what he called the approved photographs.

So after each photographic sitting, he would send his favorite images back to Buckingham Palace, and then the private secretaries would agree which pictures could be published in the press.

-What's these backdrops that he's using?

They look like stage scenery.

-The backdrops are such an important part of Beaton's aesthetic when he's photographing the royals.

Often, they're based on well-known paintings.

The one that you can see here is "The Swing" by Fragonard, but the figure of the woman on the swing has been removed.

-It is.

Ah, yeah.

-Yes.

And often, he would bring in, in front of these beautiful backdrops, flowers from his own garden to really fill the empty space in the foreground of the pictures And I think so often in his royal portraits, he's creating a sort of mini theater set for the royal subjects to pose within.

It's like a little stage in which he places Princess Elizabeth.

♪♪ -In 1953, Beaton and Elizabeth put on their biggest show ever.

Beaton knew exactly how he wanted his photograph to capture the coronation, and this was the result.

♪♪ An imagine infused with glamour and more than a hint of camp.

Elizabeth was transformed into a sovereign with star quality.

♪♪ Cecil Beaton was less a photographer than a magician.

He was able to conjure up pure romance.

What he did that day was create an idealized, fairy tale version of a queen.

It was a theatrical fantasy.

The shoot took his team of assistants several days to prepare.

There were so many people involved that Beaton didn't even press the button on the camera himself.

As if even Buckingham Palace wasn't grand enough, Beaton brought in a backdrop of Westminster Abbey, where the coronation had just happened.

He had his sister arrange the Queen's outfit, and he shone a really bright light right at her head, to give her a sort of a halo effect.

There had never been a more otherworldly coronation portrait.

By drawing on the past, Beaton was underlining Elizabeth's credentials to rule, just like a Renaissance artist.

Beaton is doing the same job for our queen that Holbein had done for Henry VIII, minus the codpiece.

Beaton was clearly drawing on centuries of royal portraiture.

Just like Henry or Elizabeth I, the Queen's wearing a sort of superhuman outfit, but unlike them, she looks warm.

She's not intimidating, and that seems right, because she's a monarch who no longer has hard power.

Instead, she has soft power.

♪♪ Beaton captured British monarchy in it's timeless glory, but as well as expressing pomp and ceremony, the monarchy's got to look comfortable in the modern world, and that's where photography can help other members of the royal family to shine.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪♪ Elizabeth was the elder of two daughters, which made her the King's heir, and her sister Margaret, well, she was the spare.

♪♪ Princess Margaret was a great believer in the monarchy, but once it became clear that her sister was going to be queen, it also became clear that Margaret was always going to be in second place.

But with that second place came a freedom the monarch could never enjoy.

♪♪ It was played out through photography, and soon proved useful in extending the royal family's appeal.

While the rest of the royals were busy being a bit Victorian, Margaret was refreshingly modern.

Margaret was quite happy to be photographed showing a bit of shoulder, wearing sunglasses, even smoking.

You will never find a photograph of the Queen enjoying a cigarette, but these images reveal Margaret's dilemma.

She didn't want to be the black sheep of the royal family.

She wanted to be part of the whole thing, and yet, as she put it, "Disobedience is my joy."

In 1959, to mark the free-spirited princess's 29th birthday, a portrait was released by a hot property fashion photographer who'd caught her eye.

He was Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon.

While Beaton had pretended that he was painting a portrait, Snowdon liked to catch people unawares.

It was a much more realistic style.

So he disarmed Princess Margaret by chatting with her, making jokes with her, treating her just like a normal person.

This was flying in the face of royal convention, but neither one of them wanted to make a conventional royal image.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] The results were sizzling.

Quite shockingly for the 1950s, Princess Margaret seems to be naked, but even that isn't the most exciting thing about the picture.

What really sizzles is her smoldering glance at the camera or possibly at the photographer.

No royal person had ever looked at a camera quite like that before.

Scorchio.

The spark between subject and photographer was there for all to see.

In 1960, Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones got married.

When Beaton got booked to take the wedding photos, Snowdon couldn't help chipping in with all sorts of useful suggestions.

You can imagine Beaton absolutely seething.

♪♪ Snowdon and Margaret were rock-star royals, comfortably mixing with the likes of the Beatles.

These eye-catching images signaled that royalty loved pop culture.

In that way, at least, they could be just like us.

-I think photography has afforded monarchy the ability to be flexible, to show themselves to be modern, forward-thinking, progressive, in tune with its people in a huge, huge way, and I think that allows them to have a much, much broader appeal and perhaps a broader relevance.

♪♪ -But you can have too much of a good thing.

All the photos of hobnobbing with the stars raised questions about Margaret's role.

Under pressure, her marriage to Snowdon began to break down.

The couple tried to brave it out through photographs.

The royal ceremonial dress collection at Hampton Court Palace holds an outfit Margaret wore in some of this media-savvy couple's most famous pictures.

This is just the raciest little dress.

It belonged to Princess Margaret, and it's cotton.

It's washable.

It's off-the-rack, and here's the racy part.

You could take off this little top to reveal that not only is it above the knee, it's also strapless.

She wore this in 1967 on a holiday in the Bahamas, except it wasn't really a holiday.

There'd been trouble in her marriage with Lord Snowdon.

They were supposed to be on their second honeymoon, and they needed to stage a photo opportunity to show togetherness.

♪♪ So for that photograph, this dress is perfect.

It's colorful.

It's youthful.

It's absolutely on trend for 1967, and it's not at all the sort of thing that Her Majesty the Queen would be seen wearing.

Despite the carefully chosen dress, there was only so long these photos could keep the rumors at bay.

But it was in this troubled phase of their relationship that some of the most striking royal photos ever were taken.

As the light began to go out of their marriage, Snowdon's portraits of his wife got darker and more dramatic.

This one was taken in 1967 when the marriage was really on the rocks.

And in it she looks, if possible, even more naked, and she's lit with more melodrama.

Snowdon's moody lighting seems almost like a metaphor for their darkening relationship.

Because of the special bond between this artist and this sitter, these will always be a unique set of images.

Margaret's role as the more glamorous sideshow to the main event has been passed down through generations.

♪♪ Prince Harry is a magnet for press coverage in a way that his brother William rarely has been.

But while Margaret may have actively engaged with photography, her great-nephews haven't had so much choice.

The royal-as-celebrity photo looks here to stay.

You could hardly get further away from the earliest royal photography, which wasn't about glamour or gossip at all.

♪♪ There was a time, of course, when photography didn't exist.

You'd only see royals in their official portraits looking implausibly impressive.

But when photography came along, royals began to look real, and it was Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, who realized that this wasn't so much a problem as an opportunity.

♪♪ Victoria and Albert were early adopters when it came to photography.

They got into it when it was still a wonder of science, and they would use it to change the relationship between the monarchy and its people.

They became convinced that photographs, not speeches, were the best way to communicate.

In fact, the invention of the camera enabled the reinvention of the British monarchy for the modern era.

♪♪ In 1842, Albert was the first to have his photo taken.

This picture was the first time a British royal had ever been depicted as he really was, without the flashery or dodgy technique of a painter getting in the way.

♪♪ The earliest known photo of Queen Victoria was taken a couple of years later.

She wasn't exactly full of the joys of spring.

The royal couple commissioned photos of themselves and their children, and quickly became captivated by this new medium marrying art with cutting-edge science.

But I have a pressing question about the look of these early photos.

Why is it that Victorians, in their photographs, look so rigid?

-Well, exposure times of these process varies around 20 seconds or so.

-So you have to be utterly stiff for 20, 30 seconds.

If I move, it spoils the picture.

-Well, yes.

People will have head stands to hold them in place, but also, they will use columns and pillars to help to stay stable.

-You've just got to be as still as possible.

-Indeed.

Exactly.

-It's a good challenge.

♪♪ Fortunately, I've been spared the head clamp.

♪♪ -I'm going to take your picture in 3, 2, 1, and -- -In the 1850s, photography was a pastime for the wealthy.

Victoria and Albert actually had their own dark room in Windsor Castle.

-Done.

You can breathe.

[ Chuckles ] -[ Sighs dramatically ] -[ Laughs ] -With a few more chemicals, an image forms on the glass negative.

And voilà, the Duchess of Worsley.

Magic!

Look.

-Yeah, it's a very beautiful process to it.

-I'm emerging.

-Yeah.

-Oh.

I don't look very happy, do I?

And I know that I wasn't feeling grim.

It's just that I look like I am.

And that gives me a new insight into Queen Victoria.

Perhaps she was giggling inside.

-[ Chuckles ] -Victoria and Albert's early photos were private amusements.

They were made for family and friends, certainly not for the great unwashed.

But in 1858, this photograph was displayed at an exhibition in London, and it changed the royal image forever.

This was the first photo Victoria's people ever got to see of their queen, and she's not wearing a crown.

They look like just a very bourgeois, almost frumpy couple, the sort of people you might see walking down the street.

And this was a shrewd move.

With fears of revolution in Britain, showing off your regal splendor wasn't the smartest idea.

Because we're so used to seeing pictures of royal people, I don't think we can really understand what a turning point this was.

Regular, respectable Victorians must have been amazed to discover that their queen was just like them, regular and respectable herself.

With real political power slowly ebbing away from the monarchy, Victoria and Albert realized that photography offered a new and more intimate way to influence British life.

Helen, what are all these little pictures we've got on the table?

-They're called carte de visite, because they were approximately the size of a visiting card.

You could go and buy a carte de visite of the people you admired -- you know, Mr. Disraeli or Charles Dickens or Tennyson.

-How did the phenomenon of these tiny pictures of the monarchy come about?

-Well, by 1860, Victoria and Albert decided, as this growing fashion for carte de visite had really taken off by then, to have a whole set done of them and their children.

So a photographer called John Mayall was commissioned to come to the palace and take a whole set.

-And if I wanted to own one of these of Queen Victoria, I would go to the stationer's shop, and I would just buy it?

-Yes, they were circulated en masse across the British empire, and suddenly, the monarchy was there in everyone's front room.

They were part of the fabric of your everyday life.

You could look up, and you could see them, and you knew what they really looked like.

-They're the opposite of glamorous, aren't they?

-Absolutely.

-They're totally relatable if you, too, are a stodgy middle-class person.

-Yeah, but it was absolutely the image that Albert wanted to promote, which was uncontroversial, safe.

-They're very collectible, aren't they?

One's not enough.

You really want to have the whole of the royal family.

You might be thinking, "I haven't got Princess Alexandra."

-Yes!

Have you?

Can you swap?

-Swap, swap.

-Yes.

[ Chuckles ] ♪♪ -In December 1861, Prince Albert, the royal with such a passion for photography, died.

♪♪ Victoria put on her black mourning dress and, through photographs, became the ultimate grieving widow.

This is one of Queen Victoria's widows outfits.

This is her bodice with little buttons down the front, and she would have worn it with a black skirt that matched down there.

And dressing like this would actually have worked really well for Victorian photography, contrary to what you might think.

Their cameras loved the sheen of the satin and the sparkle of the jet, and that's because they were using the technology of silver nitrate.

If you wore white, you'd look all ethereal and ghostly.

Black actually took a really good photograph.

As Victoria withdrew from the public eye, images of the queen in mourning kept her in the hearts and minds of her people.

♪♪ Victoria was using photography to make her private grief into a public thing.

For years, her subjects didn't see her in the flesh because she retreated behind closed doors, and yet they did see her everywhere, in the form of these carte de visite.

And not only did they see her, they saw her at her most vulnerable.

♪♪ For decades, photographs also kept Albert's memory alive and made sure he stayed part of the Queen's story.

Victoria commissioned images with Albert's presence represented in ghostly echo, with photos or paintings or busts as his stand-in.

He even appeared in their son's wedding photo, which must have been...awkward.

♪♪ But after a decade of completely depressing pictures, the people began to tire of seeing their monarch purely as a widow.

Increasingly, it was seen as self-indulgent.

Victoria needed a new kind of photo to keep her public happy.

What they wanted was some of that old, regal magic.

Handily, in 1876, she was made Empress of India.

♪♪ Now, once Victoria became an empress, she began to be photographed in a whole new way.

This format is called a cabinet card.

It became very popular in the 1870s and '80s.

It's about the size of a postcard, and these pictures have a very different feel to them.

She looks magnificent.

She's gazing off into the distance, thinking imperial thoughts, like an empress should.

And these mark the third and final stage of the evolution of brand Victoria.

She's no longer a submissive and middle-class-looking wife, nor is she a vulnerable and grieving widow.

She's emerged triumphant as a sort of superhuman being.

Here, she is the British Empire made flesh.

But if you wanted to turn a plump, 60-something woman into a superhuman empress, you had to use every trick in the photographer's book, and some of the tricks were surprisingly modern-sounding.

In these negatives, you can see they've been scraping away at the image, sort of to Photoshop it.

You can see that her double chin's been removed.

And if you look up at her hair, some light strokes there have made it look thicker and fuller.

Victoria's subjects had gone from being a mere audience for royal photographs -- They were now quite fussy consumers, and their demands would shape how the royal family presented itself.

And one kind of image is guaranteed to go straight to people's hearts.

♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪♪ We are just ravenous for photos of the royals off-duty, pictures that go behind all the ceremony and show them not just looking but behaving like the rest of us -- well, assuming that we all push swings in a suit.

♪♪ These very human photographs create a sense of connection and even affection.

♪♪ Now, let's not forget that despite their informality, these pictures have invariably been taken by professional photographers.

But this kind of photo has genuinely spontaneous roots, and it was pioneered by one of the most fascinating royal photographers of all, who understood life on both sides of the camera.

♪♪ What do you think was the most popular photograph of the 19th century?

It wasn't Queen Victoria.

It was, in fact, this one of her daughter-in-law, Alexandra, with one of her little girls on her back.

It's a really lovely informal image.

It's like a glimpse behind the scenes of life in the royal family.

And if you want a sneaky peek like that, what better than to get an actual royal to be a photographer?

As well as being something of a Victorian meme, Alexandra was a dab hand with a camera herself.

In the 1880s, she got into a revolutionary new technology from the American company Kodak.

Instead of glass plates, it used flexible film.

Taking a picture became fast and easy.

Up until now, photography had been stilted and wooden, but Kodak's camera gear was helping the Victorian image loosen up.

These new box cameras -- Alexandra had several of them -- democratized photography.

They were so handy.

You could carry them about with you, and you didn't need a tripod.

This is all you had to do.

And that's a snapshot.

You didn't have to get people to pose.

And Alexandra herself quickly got the hang of this new, candid style of photography.

Go, Allie.

Go.

Alexandra had a sharp eye for images of her family on holiday, out at sea.

She even caught Queen Victoria having a stroll.

This was far more spur-of-the-moment stuff than anything the royals had featured in before.

♪♪ After the death of Queen Victoria, Alexandra's husband become King Edward VII, and Alexandra became queen.

As a photographer, Alexandra was the real deal, but as a queen, she was often frustrated.

She was deaf, and she was also very beautiful, and this combination meant that people often didn't take her seriously.

Meanwhile, her husband, Edward VII, was often off having affairs, the cad.

I have the sense that having something creative that she was good at perhaps gave Alexandra some consolation.

♪♪ Like those very first photos of Victoria and her family, Alexandra was taking these pictures for private consumption.

But Kodak persuaded her to lend them a few for exhibitions promoting their cameras.

The turning point came in 1907, when Alexandra was asked whether she would publish her photographs in a book to raise money for charity.

It was teased in the press as containing informal, unofficial, everyday, human snapshots.

And the result was this book, "Photographs From My Camera" by Queen Alexandra.

And she gives us a look at royal family life as never before.

We see them doing things that are almost ordinary, like having a nice cup of tea or playing with a cat.

There's no hint here of her troubled marriage.

At least between the pages of her own book, Alexandra has the happy family life that she wanted.

It was released on the 12th of November, 1908, for half a crown.

10 days later, it had sold 358,000 copies.

Alexandra's career as a photographer stimulated an appetite for pictures of monarchs off-duty.

But that appetite quickly became an expectation.

She started off something that still continues to this day, which is a need for royal people to balance sharing their private lives with having something private for themselves.

♪♪ Like her Edwardian predecessor, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is a keen photographer using the latest technology.

But there's ever greater pressure on her to provide images of her family life.

In recent years, she's released photographs she took herself of life behind the scenes and posted them direct on Instagram.

These off-duty images contrast with another essential element of the royal photo album.

♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪♪ [ Crowd cheering ] In the modern era, the monarchy relies on public opinion to keep going.

Essential for generating this goodwill are photo opportunities such as the ever-reliable royal walkabout.

These carefully planned and controlled events create encounters that feel spontaneous, presenting royalty as literally in touch with everyday people.

As an officially approved royal photographer, Chris Jackson's job is to capture these moments.

What are the tips for getting a good photo during a royal walkabout?

-You always have to preempt what's going to happen.

Quite often, you find yourself in crowds of thousands of people, all keen to sort of catch a glimpse or shake hands with the royals, and, you know, that can be a challenge from my point of view -- you know, getting the right position and getting the best possible shot.

Often, weird or wonderful gifts are thrust into their hands by members of the public, and, you know, you want to capture that moment.

That's the important part of the tour.

[ Crowd clamoring ] A very special job I photographed with the Queen was when she visited Blood Swept Lands in the Tower of London, and this was an incredible art installation that really captured the public's imagination.

Over 888,000 ceramic poppies represented the fallen.

And the Queen with the Duke of Edinburgh walked through this amazing field in the moat outside the tower.

I took sort of low perspectives, so it blew out focus all the poppies in the foreground, and it was a lovely moment.

It was clearly a particularly poignant engagement for the Queen, as you can see from the picture.

-She looks moved, visibly moved.

-Yeah.

-Now, what on earth is going on in this picture here?

-Yeah.

Prince Harry, he is great to photograph, and it's just the most unexpected things happen as you bounce around.

-You get the impression from pictures like that, that he's a fun person.

-Great sense of fun.

I've been on so many fantastic royal tours with him where the most unexpected things happen.

I mean, we probably all remember when he raced Usain Bolt during a visit to Jamaica, and they had an impromptu race, and Prince Harry sprinting off before it started -- -And that is just Prince Harry.

He's just like that, and it comes across on camera.

-Exactly.

But I think a lot of these things have a deeper message.

I remember going to a clinic in South London on what I assumed was a fairly straightforward engagement, but Prince Harry took the first HIV test taken by a member of the royal family.

And it was, you know, breaking new ground, continuing the legacy of his mother, who did a huge amount of work with HIV and AIDS, and it was a special moment.

Photos are such an important part of royal tours.

If the pictures aren't great, often the royal tour is not perceived as, you know, a huge success, because it is a way that people see what's going on via your pictures.

-These authorized, charming images keep the monarchy connected to the people.

But what about all the unauthorized, altogether less charming photos?

♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] There are countless photos that the royals wish had never seen the light of day.

Examples might include Princess Margaret with her younger lover... ♪♪ ...an elderly lady looking just a bit grumpy at the races, and Prince Harry disproving the rule that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

But there was one royal who trumps them all.

In his younger days, the future Edward VIII was the most adored Prince of Wales in history.

His dashing demeanor and movie-star looks captivated the public and the cameras just as photojournalism was reaching its heyday.

But he also liked the ladies, and if they were married, even better.

When he took the throne in 1936, the press began to pay attention to his regular appearances with one Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

From the middle of the 1930s, the newspapers all knew that Edward was having this relationship with Wallis Simpson, who, most inconveniently was married.

But the editors had a gentlemen's agreement that they weren't going to publish any pictures of him and her together.

In America, newspapers had few qualms about publishing pictures of the King and his mistress.

Behind the scenes, his desire to marry Wallis clashed with the state's unwillingness to allow him to marry a woman who was divorced.

But in December 1936, the dam broke.

The pictures couldn't be hushed up any longer, and they were published in Britain.

They were explosive.

Look, she's stroking his arm.

They're practically canoodling.

And I don't think it's at all an accident that just a few days later, he abdicated.

In this photo, Edward and Wallis had been on a Mediterranean cruise with photographers pursuing them in planes and waiting in every port.

And once he abdicated, the press abandoned all restraint.

The former king became something no British royal had ever been before -- fair game.

Here he is snapped on the back seat of a car.

He's trying to hide himself.

He looks hunted.

His expression is almost haunted.

He's a man on the run from the camera.

It all seems very modern.

♪♪ Tactics were evolving to include all the now-familiar tricks of the tabloid trade -- long-range telephoto lenses... stakeouts, ambush encounters.

Royal deference was no longer a barrier between camera and subject.

Edward was just another celebrity caught in a scandal.

For the royal family, Pandora's box had opened.

♪♪ The shock of King Edward's abdication was felt across the world but nowhere more so than in the family home of his brother, who was now expected to become king.

Now, the new king, the future George VI, was perhaps a rather dull and earnest man, but under the circumstances, that's exactly what everybody wanted.

Photography had got the royal family into this mess, but it would now help them to get out of it.

George had seen what happened when the wrong photos got into the wrong hands, so he now released images of his own family that showed them as respectable, ordinary, almost suburban, right down to their pets.

♪♪ The pictures combined two kinds of royal photography -- the "steady as she goes" tradition of Victorian Albert and the heartwarming informality of Alexandra.

♪♪ They were taken by wife-and-husband team Lisa and Jimmy Sheridan.

Crucially, these two didn't specialize in celebrity pictures but more everyday subjects.

How did Lisa and Jimmy of Studio Lisa manage to become royal photographers?

It was quite a surprising journey, wasn't it?

-Yes, absolutely.

They begin really as enthusiastic amateurs.

Jimmy stumbles across a discarded camera whilst he's in France during the war, and he brings it back, and they begin to photograph their two daughters.

And Lisa submits a number of photographs to various newspaper competitions, which begins to get her a little bit of attention, and eventually she's commissioned into commercial contracts.

At some stage, she's contacted and asked if she will take photographs for a new book on royal dogs, and this is to begin with a shoot with the Duke and Duchess of York and their two daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.

-She works her way up from royal dogs to royal people.

-Yes, and lots of royal dogs still.

[ Laughs ] And actually it's a lot of the photographs of members the family with the Corgis which become some of the most iconic and the most loved.

-What did Studio Lisa do with the image of George VI and family?

-I think what Studio Lisa does differently and what's new is this unprecedented level of intimacy into the home and private life of the royal family to the extent that I don't even think it's been replicated since.

I think this is perhaps the most open the royal family have ever been to allowing the camera into their private spaces.

So we see the princesses' bedrooms at Buckingham Palace.

We see them carrying out family life at Royal Lodge at Windsor in a completely sort of relaxed, authentic way that doesn't feel contrived.

♪♪ -The vast archives at the Getty Images Library contain the original photos from Lisa and Jimmy's sessions.

♪♪ Lisa and Jimmy perfected a really successful way of working together.

Jimmy operated the camera and stayed in the background, and Lisa was the friendly face.

She was out there very charmingly positioning everybody just as she wanted them, and then she'd go over and give Jimmy a tap on the shoulder so that he knew when to take the shot.

♪♪ I think that this one really shows the magic of Studio Lisa.

This is not at all easy, what Lisa's done.

She's got a whole bunch of royal people to relax or at least to appear to relax.

There's the queen mum, sticking her head out the window.

Even the Corgis seem to be doing what Lisa has told them to do.

Lisa Sheridan was brilliant at eliminating awkwardness.

By playing with timing, the same setting could be formal, like it is in this photograph, but in this one, rather like an outtake, they seem to have forgotten the camera altogether.

They're having a joke.

It's in these moments that Lisa best made the case for George VI and his family.

Her body of work from the '30s and '40s tells a story about the young Princess Elizabeth growing up, getting mature, right up to the point where Cecil Beaton waves his magic wand, and the duckling becomes a swan.

That transformation at the coronation would've been all the more striking to people at the time because they were familiar, in a way that we no longer are, with this image of the gawky, slightly swotty schoolgirl.

♪♪ Elizabeth's transformation from geek to icon echoes in the story of a later princess, one who also had an instinct for fashion like Princess Margaret... ♪♪ ...and who, like Edward VIII, fueled a tabloid feeding frenzy.

But above all, she conveyed a level of compassion and emotion rarely before captured in royal photographs.

♪♪ Princess Diana died pursued by photographers, but in her lifetime, she proved to have an amazing grasp of how photography works.

I can't help wondering if Diana was good at her job partly because she wasn't born royal.

Just like the rest of us, she'd been a consumer of monarchy from the outside.

By the time she became a public figure in 1981, monarchy had basically become a series of photo opportunities, but Diana would bring her own special charisma to the business of being photographed.

She really was exceptionally good at communicating through images.

The man who perhaps knows more than anyone else about photographing the royals and who worked extensively with Diana is Anwar Hussein, a photographer with an unusual approach.

So, what do you think is the secret of success to be a royal photographer?

-I think it's the instinct.

-The instinct.

-I didn't realize, but now, looking back, I realize.

Because I used to photograph the wild animals.

I was born in Africa.

-You used to photograph wild animals?

-Yeah.

-That's a really good analogy, isn't it?

-Well, I had instinct to get the right picture, and that's the same instinct, I think.

-Yes.

You treated her sort of like a wild animal, really.

-Well, wild.

That's what it means... Because I was not used to this pomp and ceremony and things like... -Yeah.

Yeah.

And they liked that, didn't they?

-Yeah.

-Now, this picture is...

The family was so fond of his work that, more than 50 years on, Anwar is now the longest-serving royal photographer, and he captured some of the most iconic images of Diana.

Anwar, tell me the story of this picture here.

They're not posing, are they?

-No.

-It was genuine kiss.

-Yeah.

All the crowd was saying, "Kiss, kiss, kiss."

And you can see Diana be shy and Charles being shy, and all of a sudden... [ Camera shutter clicks ] I was still had my big lens there, and I managed to capture.

I was so proud about it.

And it happened such a quickly...

This picture is slightly blurred.

-And tell me what's happening here.

-This was picture of Diana.

She was holding this little boy who was suffering from cancer, and she just hold him for a long time.

She didn't care whether the camera is there.

She had this empathy.

If you look at the look... And this boy is blind, but he felt her empathy and loving.

And she told me this is one of her favorite picture.

-Now, this picture really did change people's minds about HIV, didn't it?

-Yeah, it did.

Yeah.

She decided to go and visit the AIDS persons, which was very controversial at the time.

Going back a few years, AIDS was something, you know, taboo.

As far as I know, they didn't want this picture to go out, but Diana said it's very important.

-So this picture is all about those two hands touching each other.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

-So, when she was sitting there, do you think she was aware that this picture had the potential, really, to change people's minds about HIV?

-Oh, yes.

I think.

Yes.

-She knew that.

-Definitely.

She had uncanny way of telling stories through her action and pictures.

She know what will go next day or next on newspaper.

She was very -- Afterward became very clever.

Diana wanted to always portray -- A photographer point a camera at what image she wanted to go.

She was very clever, and sometimes if she was in a bad mood or something or feeling lonely and... She did quite often... -Pick up the phone.

Be her own publicist.

-Well, not tell me, but in a way... -They came to you.

Somehow.

-...somebody, some way... somehow, something going to happen.

So, like, the picture of her on the beach, if you look at the beach, it's a nice picture.

It really feels like she was in heaven on her own, and she wanted to portray that, her loneliness.

-It's very funny to speak to your husband through the pages of the national newspapers, isn't it?

But that's what she was doing.

Now, this is one of the most famous pictures in the world, isn't it?

What's going on in this one?

-Against all the advice she was given, she took up this cause she felt very strongly about -- land mines.

And she went there, and she was prepared to walk.

I think it must have touched Harry in a way.

That's why he wanted to do the... -And this is a picture of Prince Harry in exactly the same spot, is it?

-Yeah.

-Taken by your son?

-[ Chuckles ] Yeah, taken by my son.

Yeah, it was amazing to be able to compare these two pictures.

-Two generations of royals and of photographers.

-Yeah.

-Do you think that he has some of her qualities as a sitter, as a star?

-Definitely.

Definitely.

He's more nature -- Like Diana.

He can feel about people.

When we went to Africa, he was already holding kids like exactly mother.

He feels the same empathy which Diana had.

-With Princess Diana's death, the relationship between the royal family and photography would never be so close again.

Inevitably, her sons, William and Harry, have been much more wary of the medium, restricting access by the press and tightly controlling the photos released of them and their families.

Harry and Megan's decision to step back from royal duties may give them even more say over how their images are used.

The days seem long gone when the royal family worked with photographers to create innovative pictures that changed how the public saw the monarchy.

Instead, today's generation deliberately evoke the iconic images of their predecessors.

When was the last time you saw a royal picture that really took you by surprise?

But ultimately, the royal family, so reliant on images, have to stay in the camera's gaze whether they like it or not.

It seems to me that being royal must be a bit like being an actor -- playing a part that somebody else has written for you.

And for the last 150 years, since the time of Queen Victoria, photography has been the stage upon which monarchy's been performed.

♪♪ The royals have proved to be the most versatile of performers.

They can deliver blockbuster spectacle, but they can also be understated and intimate.

The key to their survival as an institution has been knowing what image the public needs to see and when.

But photography is more than a stage.

It's also become a battlefield.

The pictures that the royals want you to see compete with the ones that they don't.

It's pretty clear that even a king or a queen is less mighty than the power of a camera.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪