She was, for seventy years, the most photographed human being on the planet. Every state appearance, every public gesture, every expression was documented by banks of cameras belonging to press photographers, official photographers, amateur snappers, tourists. She existed, in the public imagination, almost entirely as a photographic subject.
What almost nobody knew — or rather, what people knew but rarely thought about — is that she was also photographing back.
A Lifelong Passion
Queen Elizabeth II’s relationship with photography began before the war, when her father King George VI gave the young Princess Elizabeth a Box Brownie camera. It was a start that millions of British children shared in that era, but for Elizabeth it became a genuine and sustained passion that lasted the rest of her life.
By the time she was queen, she had developed specific preferences. Her favorite camera, the one she was most often seen with at the equestrian events she loved, was a Leica M3 — the same camera used by Henri Cartier-Bresson, by Sebastião Salgado, by virtually every photojournalist of the mid-twentieth century who cared about image quality. She used it with a Summicron 50mm f/2 lens and an accessory light meter mounted in the hot shoe, a configuration so knowledgeable as to be almost startling.
Later she transitioned to the Leica M6, which incorporated a built-in light meter. If you enjoy the image of a monarch reading camera magazines and deciding she wanted a meter she didn’t have to clip on separately, this is accurate information.
The Collection
Beyond the Leicas, she owned and used a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex — a medium format camera with a waist-level viewfinder that produces 6×6 images on 120 film. The Rolleiflex, held at the hip and viewed from above, creates an unusual physical relationship with the subject: you look down at the ground glass, which shows the scene in mirror image, while the person in front of you sees you staring into a box rather than pointing a camera at their face. Many photographers find it disarming in the best possible way.
She also owned a gold-finished Rollei 35 — one of the smallest 35mm cameras ever made — which she used on royal tours. Photographs exist of her holding it up to her eye in Tuvalu in 1982, wearing a floral dress and her characteristic gloves, the tiny camera incongruous and somehow entirely correct.
For film: as far as anyone can document, she never used a digital camera. A committed film photographer throughout her life, possibly through and through.
The Photographs We Cannot See
The photographs Elizabeth II made over seventy years of using cameras have never been publicly exhibited. We do not know what she chose to photograph at the events we watched her attend. We do not know what she saw through the viewfinder at Badminton Horse Trials or Windsor Horse Show or during the 1953 coronation tour, when she was photographed with a Kodak movie camera on board the SS Gothic filming the arrival of the HMNZS Black Prince in the South Pacific.
It is one of the more tantalizing gaps in the photographic record of the twentieth century. The royal archives almost certainly contain thousands of photographs made by the most consequential public figure of her generation, showing the world as it appeared from inside her particular life. Whether they will ever be made public is unknown.
What It Means
There is something worth sitting with in the image of Queen Elizabeth II — Leica around her neck, light meter attached, peering through the viewfinder at Prince Philip competing in carriage dressage — doing exactly what millions of her subjects were doing at that moment with their own cameras at their own sporting events. Photography, more than almost any other hobby, is the great equalizer. You see it or you don’t. The camera does not care what passport you carry.
She carried a very good camera. She carried it for her whole life. That’s enough to earn respect in any community.