First she was a modest, young nursery school teacher — Princess Diana might have later become one of the world’s most beloved style icons. Among them, Arthur Edwards was one of the early photographers to record her journey, recently looking back on an iconic 1980 photo incidentally making headlines.
Taken when Diana was 19 and dating Prince Charles, the photo panned in a park where Diana is wearing a skirt which, backlit by the sun, again became see through. Now a long time royal photographer for The Sun, Edwards insists it was innocent. Edwards said she ‘never meant for the photo to come out like that.’ “Such a rare, spontaneous moment that every photographer hopes for: totally unplanned, but also too compelling not to share.”
At the moment of camera roll, Edwards had just been ordered to report from the royal beat and was itching to snap a picture of Diana, who at that point was a soft-spoken teacher and Charles’s new girlfriend. He was aware she worked at a preschool in London, so with a knocking of doors finally found his location.
Then Edwards had gained the owner’s permission to drive Diana and two young students to a nearby park for some hurried photos. According to him, ‘she struck a pose and I snapped a few shots’. The sun now appeared, backlighting her skirt and dimming her legs in silhouette. ‘That was all chance’, Edwards said. “Yet it made the shot an iconic one.”
Diana was embarrassed when the image ran in newspapers throughout the U.K. She reportedly told Charles she did not want to be remembered as “the girlfriend with no petticoat.” But this was the start of Diana’s complicated relationship with the press.
But Edwards kept on photographing Diana as she aged from a shy young woman to ‘people’s princess’. ‘She was always graceful, always kind,’ Edwards said. The work and the down to earth charm that Diana had allowed the public to believe about the monarchy was transformed. She hugged AIDS patients, comforted leprosy patients and actions that, forever, would endear her to the world.
Today, Diana’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, and their wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, carry on that tradition of public service, joined by each other. Edwards, who had predicted the pressures Meghan Markle’s life in the royal family years ago, told AFP back in 2017: ‘It’s a lot of pressure.’ If they can handle it great, otherwise it is best to step away.”
In January 2020, Harry and Meghan abruptly became the first British senior royals to step down, who subsequently moved to the U.S. and now reside in Santa Barbara, California. Diana’s relationship with royal life was complex, and often challenging, and that is exactly why she chose to follow a different path than her peers.