When Queen Victoria lined up five of the royal children before a camera in 1852, it was her intention to provide the adoring nation with a glimpse of the exemplary home life of their own dear queen. As the photographer pressed the shutter, the Queen looked down; when the image appeared on the daguerreotype plate, she seemed to have her eyes shut. Victoria applied the royal thumb and rubbed the offending image clean off the plate. Candour had its limits. The Queen's decision to deface the plate reflects a rather sophisticated understanding that if the image existed it would be used. She had no intention of giving Chartists or any other agitators the chance of marching behind banners displaying pictures of a monarch with her eyes shut.
These pictures can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery's blockbuster exhibition, The World's Most Photographed, which opens next month. Their candidates range from Queen Victoria to Muhammad Ali, and provide timely reflections not only on the history of celebrity, notoriety and the nature of iconography, but on the relationship between photography and power.
In providing her subjects with a plethora of images of herself, Victoria was simply following royal precedent. Every British monarch since Henry VIII has recognised the importance of keeping the royal likeness before the public, and endured the tedium of sitting for court artists, if only for as long as was necessary to draw a likeness of his or her face. The trappings of rank were displayed on a mannequin; studio underlings would be left to record them down to every seedpearl and aiglet, not once but again and again. The process worked both ways; by the end of her reign, Elizabeth I was appearing in public effectively disguised as her portrait, resplendent in wig, face paint and false front.
In every royal court in Europe, gangs of painters and printmakers laboured to produce an endless series of portraits, to hang in every location where royal prerogative and royal power were to be exerted. The process was time-consuming, unwieldy and costly, but it was considered worth it. Photography had no sooner become possible than Europe's royals recognised it as a way to increase the number of available images at minimal cost and inconvenience to themselves. What was more, this imagery would be egalitarian, modest, everyday. The monarch might even smile, so bypassing protocol and politicians and making her way straight into the hearts of the public.
It was probably a music-hall performer who first answered the question, "What you would say if you met the queen?" with "That reminds me - I must buy a stamp." Most of our stamps still bear an engraving of the monarch in profile, with something crownlike on her head. Since Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1954, untold billions, maybe trillions, of exemplars of this image have appeared, on stamps, on coins, on letterheads, watermarks, wherever royal authority is to be invoked. Every 20 years or so it is updated; one diadem is swapped for another; a wattle is added to the cheek, a dewlap to the chin, a wrinkle or two engraved in the brow. However it is tweaked, the profile is not recognisable. Elizabeth Windsor couldn't put it in her passport; for that she would need a photograph. Bizarrely enough, while for matters of state the incised character still carries more authority than the image made of light, photographs - even digital photographs that can be completely transformed by editing - are considered true likenesses. Therein lies their power.
Without the creation of a visual analogue that can be replicated ad infinitum, power, no matter how absolute, remains imperceptible. Western autarchs have seen the dissemination of images of their superhuman selves as indispensable to their rule since at least the fourth century BC. As Alexander the Great advanced into Asia, he ordered a depiction of his features to be placed on the coins minted and the medals struck to celebrate his conquests. His profile would be the image chosen for medals and coins, to imbue the new subjects with a due sense of the power of the Greek state along with the illusion of personal rule. Then as now, all was not as it seemed. The face on the coins may have been no more than a mask. There is no record of Alexander actually sitting for a sculptor. Given the rantipole rate of his eastward progress, he probably never did. The profile we have come to accept as that of Alexander is also that of the boy god, Apollo. Alexander's laurels are the same as the ones that gird Apollo's head. That image has outlived Alexander by more than two millennia; now no one knows whether specific images are of Alexander or Apollo. One has unavoidably morphed into the other, which was probably just what Alexander intended. Who cares what he actually looked like? He is the Apollonian profile, brow sliding to axe-blade nosetip without hitch, beardless cheeks, huge eyes, small mouth with pleated lips. This ideal type surfaces occasionally, and like the helots of antiquity we fall on our faces before it. The most stunning recent avatar of the type was Elvis Presley, whose classic profile could have been lifted off one of Alexander's coins.
If photographers had existed, Napoleon Bonaparte would have had a squadron of them to accompany him to every military engagement. He was as aware as Alexander of the importance of an accessible image of the conqueror for the consolidation of his power, but he was a restless and uncooperative sitter who left painters little option but to invent what they couldn't see. The creator of the Napoleonic stereotype was Antoine-Jean Gros, who dashed off an oil sketch purporting to represent the young Napoleon at the bridge at Arcole in 1796. What he actually produced was yet another version of the Alexander-Apollo prototype of the hero. Once that image had been engraved, published and distributed all over France and the Napoleonic Empire, David, Vernet and Ingres had little option but to rework it.
Painted portraiture is understood to involve an element of idealisation; photography, on the other hand, is trusted as a record of the truth. The average reader of newspapers and magazines still believes that photographs are images of what was really happening, because the photographer is of necessity an eyewitness. So it was that photography could transform a Bavarian politician called Adolf Hitler into a combination of visionary, champion of his beleaguered people and a jolly uncle.
This was a gradual process, for Hitler first took the line of the oriental despots and refused to grant photographers access. In 1923, after AAP offered a cash prize to anyone who could produce a photograph of the leader of the emerging Nazi party, Hitler agreed to pose, occasionally and awkwardly, for official portraits, most taken by a Munich photographer called Heinrich Hoffmann. In 1930, after the Nazi party had won a significant proportion of seats in the Reichstag, Goebbels set up the propaganda machine that would embed the image of Hitler as leader in every German mind. Hoffmann, now joined by a gang of official photographers, used the same techniques for glamourising the Führer that were being used by movie studios to promote their stars, but on a truly vast scale: 5,000 or so pictures a week.
Suitable images were then selected for reproduction in newspapers, magazines, and on postcards and cigarette cards sold to raise funds for the party. No event went unrecorded by photography, and every photograph was posed. Hitler's propaganda machine invented the photo opportunity; in 1934, for example, 10 years after his incarceration, Hitler went back to the cell in Landsberg am Lech prison where he wrote Mein Kampf, so that Hoffmann could take moody new pictures.
Goebbels also realised the importance of providing Hitler's adoring public with the illusion of intimacy; a book of apparently candid and informal pictures called The Hitler Nobody Knows sold 420,000 copies. This was anything but a simple case of maximum exposure and saturation; only pictures that showed the Führer as he wished to be seen would ever be used. The rest were destroyed. Any photographer who used his camera to spy on the Führer was treated as a traitor. The cameraman who photographed Eva Braun against the Führer's wishes was sent to the eastern front.
The appalling success of Goebbels's campaign to transform an unimpressive individual with a silly moustache and risible hairstyle into a national hero and saviour of the world, so that in 1932, 13.5 million Germans cast their votes for him, could perhaps be considered a historical one-off, if it were not for the fact that the process has been repeated again and again. Similar strategies have been deployed by every dictator since, though not often with such efficiency and sophistication.
The city of Damascus used to be watched over by painted versions of photo portraits of Assad, some hanging the full height of city buildings. Every Libyan cabdriver will sport a picture of Gadafy in the back window of his cab. Photos of Saddam Hussein used to paper Iraqi cities; Iraqi newspapers carried pictures of almost nothing else. Such a proliferation of likenesses confers iconic status on the sitter. So recognisable an image, whether of prince, potentate or footballer, confers massive charisma.
In the manipulated public mind, the shock of recognition mutates into a kind of holy awe, into fainting, shrieking and tears. It would be nice to believe that democratically elected leaders could resist the temptation to use photography to turn their supporters into hysterical fans, but of course they can't. From the time that the young John Fitzgerald Kennedy was being groomed for the presidential nomination his father was looking for the right photographer to create the images that would endear his son to the nation. The strategy would not be all that different from the one adopted by Hitler's propaganda machine.
The Kennedy henchmen were hardly less effective in suppressing the wrong kind of imagery. A snapshot of Kennedy sneaking away from the apartment of one of his mistresses appeared in a single newspaper once only, and then unaccountably disappeared. No image of JFK that projected the actual state of his health was allowed to survive. The evidence of his chronic pain and incapacity that has been produced by his biographers is conclusive, but so powerful is the image of JFK as young, robust and healthy that we can hardly credit it.
Jacques Lowe, the man ultimately chosen by Kennedy père to limn his son, in full-time attendance on him throughout his presidency, compiled an archive of 40,000 negatives, which were stored in the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank at the World Trade Centre, only to be destroyed on September 11 2001.
The kind of control over the imagery of the ruler exercised by Goebbels and the Kennedy gang is no longer possible. There are too many desperate freelance photographers, too many longrange lenses and too many newspapers willing to pay fortunes for pictures of authority with its pants down. From time to time, someone will voice regret at such failure to uphold the dignity of potentates. Images of Cherie Blair with her mouth all over her face appear in our papers daily and Downing Street can do nothing about it. The Queen can only escape being photographed picking her nose by never, ever picking her nose. Photographers wait for John Prescott to nod off and away they go.
Much as we may gripe about the anarchic power of the press, it is still our best defence against the kind of murderous bamboozlement that befell the German people in the 1930s. It is chilling to reflect that handsome, smiling JFK might have led us into a third world war on the lie of his fitness to make the executive decision. Photography still connives in the fabrication of dictators' absolute power, but it will also play a role in dismantling that power, if only because revealing images can be disseminated via the internet in less time than it takes the authorities to suppress them.
· The World's Most Photographed is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, from July 6 to October 23. Details: 020-7306 0055. A BBC2 series begins on July 6. The book The World's Most Photographed, by Robin Muir, is published by NPG at £25 on July 6.