Top of .’s live blog The Guardian, on which every sliver of news about Queen Elizabeth’s condition was presented Thursday afternoon, was this photo, albeit a little more zoomed in than the one above. It is the British Queen as she was photographed by Jane Barlow on September 6, last Tuesday. In the Drawing Room of her beloved Balmoral Castle, she is waiting for Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who is also the fifteenth Prime Minister to reach out to Elizabeth.
Initially it was mainly that formal handshaking moment (Truss towering over the queen in a black suit) that came out via the news agencies. Truss succeeds Boris Johnson in a turbulent time, she’s the one who now has to do an almost impossible job and oh, oh, will she complete that task? The photo was a fine illustration of all kinds of political analyses.
But something else was playing in the background: the queen wasn’t feeling well. That’s why the new Prime Minister was not summoned to Buckingham Palace, as is customary at these official occasions, but here, by the fire in the Drawing Room, a cozy room that, according to the British media, has hardly changed since 1976.
When it became clear on Thursday that the Queen’s health was really serious, the photo with Truss suddenly gave way to the image Barlow had taken just before, that of Elizabeth alone in the room. And suddenly everyone could see what the photographer had already observed: this would not last long.
While I check the news page of The Guardian refreshed, the photo remained. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. All the royal decorum was still there: the stately space in which every object has a meaning, the Scottish skirt, a reference to a country that would like to leave the United Kingdom, but reluctantly loves the head of state so much – the Queen herself was there just not anymore.
The woman who sat on the British throne for seventy years, who still shook hands with Winston Churchill, who often considered service and devotion to duty more important than empathy and cordiality, who was loved, but also regarded by many as the queen of a kingdom that was plundering itself. and grabbing her way through history, that woman is gone in this photo. ‘Who was she really?’, French theorist Roland Barthes wonders, after his mother died and he searched for her in the photos left behind. And then, slightly alarmed, “Will I recognize her?”
Now I never went to tea with Queen Elizabeth, but I suspect this photo shows her as her relatives saw her. How she stands between that much too big furniture, leaning on the stick of her husband Philip, who died last year, with that tilted head and that radiant smile: a grandmother who is happy to see her (great)grandchildren and looking forward to a afternoon pancakes. Pure photographer’s happiness for Jane Barlow, who took such an iconic photo at the last minute.
The morning after her death, I refreshed .’s frozen live blog The Guardian again. I had expected that this photo would have been replaced by a more ceremonial image, as almost all the media presented immediately after her death: a photo of her in full regalia as queen, with the diamond crown, the scepter and that distant, probing look.
But still it was this one. I found that moving. Whoever Elizabeth was, she was this too.