Analyzing Princess Diana's Iconic Diving Board Photo

To uncover a photograph’s meaning potential, we must learn to describe the image by identifying the individual elements that visually contribute to our understanding of the photo’s reality. Princess Diana’s iconic yet haunting diving board photo captured her overwhelming sentiments of loneliness, thereby immortalizing the isolation she felt throughout her short life. Just a week before her tragic death, the image garnered significant attention in the media for its harrowing depiction of her relentless battle with the paparazzi amidst pregnancy rumours. Today, the image, as an amalgamation of photojournalism and artistic expression, is frequently recreated in reference to the royal family itself and her symbolized social seclusion. Nevertheless, we must question what visual elements made this photograph so significant decades after its capture.

We will employ the following steps or canons of use to determine the photo’s meaning potential:

1. Social functions of photographs
2. Denotation and connotation
3. Semiotic materials/Options
4. Objects
5. Colour
6. Setting
7. Participants
8. Actions and indexical links
9. Positioning the viewer

As a highly publicized spectacle, Princess Diana’s photograph was originally photojournalistic and used objectively to document her location on the yacht. The paparazzi were enthralled with her newfound whirlwind romance and chose to follow her to the boat, where they hounded her with photographs. While the image was considered a photographic witness of her reality, the media's perception transformed it into a form of symbolic expression, resonating with the public eye as a decontextualized signifier of overwhelming loneliness. As such, a photograph can serve multiple social functions, which may alter over time due to the photographer's intention contrasted against public reactions to the image.

While the image is frequently described in the media as “haunting,” we must first question what elements of the photo communicate such a sentiment. What specifically in the photograph makes us feel simultaneously tranquil and fearful? The photograph blatantly denotes Princess Diana perched atop a long, white diving board, peering into the dark ocean below. Her skin is tanned, and she dons a striking ice-blue swimsuit, contrasting against the lifebuoy floating in the water before her. The relationship between these photographic aspects, namely the sea, connotes a woman isolated from society yet experiencing a graceful sense of peace. However, feelings of tranquility are compromised by an underlying sense of thalassophobia spurring from the great mass and perceived depth of the dark water, thereby demonstrating the fear Diana experienced in the face of hounding paparazzi.

It is crucial to analyze semiotic materials as they are the fabric for constructing a photo’s material reality, thus shaping the viewer’s perception of the image. In the case of the iconic diving board photo, the visual arrangement of objects is considered a canon of use employed to allow viewers to explore the photo seamlessly. Through deletion, the photographer excluded any visual of the yacht to remove Princess Diana from reality. By employing deletion as a semiotic resource to decontextualize the captured reality, individuals can more easily resonate with sentiments of isolation. Even those unfamiliar with her lived experiences can derive a strong sense of melancholy solitude from the image of a woman hopelessly gazing into the ocean’s depths, excluded from the concrete realities of the vessel. Accordingly, decontextualization through deletion has made the photo such a popular subject of recreation and appropriation.

In the realm of photography, physical objects are utilized deliberately to convey social meanings, connecting knowledge gained through collective lived experiences with the semiotic resources the photographer offers us. However, Princess Diana's diving board photo does not provide viewers with an abundance of objectified symbols. To describe this photograph, we must turn to the diving board and the lifebuoy as the sole indicators of physical meaning. The diving board marks a choice between safety above the water or a fateful plunge into the unknown, made even more unsettling due to Diana’s unsteady positioning atop the farthest ledge. Conversely, the lifebuoy is aligned in a seemingly perfect position to catch the princess if she were to fall from the board. For that reason, it symbolizes safety in contrast to the rough waves it lies in. Perhaps the amalgamation of these elements functions to symbolize Diana’s feeling of safety at the edge of society, as far as she can physically locate herself from the societal pressures of her political stance and media image.

When examining colours in a photograph, we must derive meaning potentials from the six colour dimensions: 

1. Hue
2. Brightness
3. Saturation
4. Purity
5. Modulation
6. Luminosity

In standard trains of thought, individuals most frequently conceptualize colour as the hue, referring to those colour names that typically appear in the rainbow. These hues are arranged to both visually complement each other and to signify certain feelings. For example, blue is often associated with tranquility and melancholy, while orange signifies happiness, boldness, and youthfulness. Although this photo was a case of photojournalism, the colours interestingly reflect Princess Diana’s identity quite fittingly. Her tanned skin reflects the orange hue of the lifebuoy, which represents her eternally young, playful media image that made her so appealing to the public. At the same time, she peers out into the melancholic shade of blue, signifying her life’s tragedy.

Colours are observed on a scale ranging from brightness to darkness. Aside from the board itself, the photo is relatively dark and filled with shadows contrasting the brightness of the stark white board. As such, the majority of the photo is obscure, preventing viewers from seeing the details of the Princess’ face and making the image more solemn.

Perhaps one of the primary reasons the photograph resonates so strongly with viewers is because the colours are so saturated. Given that high saturation is an indicator of strong emotional temperature, colours in this scenario allow viewers to attach greater degrees of sentimental value to the individual hues.

Through the lens of Machin’s chromaticity continuum, the simplicity of this photo grants it public appeal by employing purity as an indicator of truth. The vividness of the colours contributes to its photojournalistic social function by reducing shades of grey and enhancing pure colours so that individuals perceive the reality as a genuine depiction of events while retaining its artistic expression.

Again, we must consider that the photojournalistic nature of this photo means that it vies to capture reality and, therefore, is rather modulated. We can describe photos like this by determining their relation to simplicity, demonstrated here through modulated colour within the waves yet a relatively high degree of graininess as we recognize that the image is cropped and closely focused. 

We can examine that the colour here does not allow light to pass through it and is not luminous. While images such as movie posters employ luminosity to demonstrate a sense of otherworldliness, photojournalistic photos such as the figure shown here exclude luminous elements to retain their footing in reality.

We must now turn to the setting as a metaphor for life experiences, largely determined by its grounding in either natural or unnatural landscapes. In this case, the ocean functions as a natural landscape to signify boundless life and existence. Many cultures associate the ocean and water as a vessel for life and its limitless possibilities which situates itself in the photograph in front of a youthful Princess Diana as an indicator of her life’s potential. 

Paparazzi photographs are largely characterized by their heavy focus on specific, individual figures, allowing viewers to humanize and empathize with celebrities by capturing their actions in everyday life. By photographing Princess Diana alone in a moment of emotional vulnerability, the public eye gained a newfound sense of empathy for her life and the harassment she underwent, even when attempting to escape prying media attention. As such, we must describe the poses and mannerisms of a photo’s participants to determine how viewers interact with visual acts. In this example, Diana’s pose is closed and solitary to reflect her internal turmoil. Despite her major role in politics, the People’s Princess was depicted here as taking up very little space, nestling her head onto herself in what many viewers perceived as an attempt to self-soothe in a somewhat relaxed manner, mirroring the stress of her public life during what was reminisced upon as a lighthearted vacation. 

By examining figures as indexical links, we can index social action without actually having to code them. When describing figures like Princess Diana, we must view her more objectively to determine how her emotional, mental, verbal, and material processes are indexed. Instead of imagining her as a political figure, she becomes a woman whose emotions and mental state are codified by her isolating, inwardly directed pose and solemn facial expression. She is not expressing anything verbally and rather appears to be pondering something while materially indexing harrowing social isolation. 

To position the viewer, we are required to employ 3 visual resources:

1. Angles of interaction
2. Distance
3. Gaze

Of the three angles of interaction, horizontal angles allow viewers to describe the photographic subject without requiring significant levels of interaction. By positioning our viewing on the horizontal axis, the image of the princess offers viewers insight into her life and perspective by depicting what would otherwise be a very private moment. However, we are not offered any degree of intimacy due to the downward tilt of the camera, thereby communicating that we are looking down on her or perceiving her from a watchful, objective stance rather than an engaging position. 

Distance is a primary determinant of viewers’ degree of familiarity and their engagement with the subject. When we describe a photo, it is crucial to establish our position on a spectrum from social to intimate, simultaneously dictating how engaged one is with the subject. In regards to Princess Diana’s photo, viewers have a social degree of familiarity with the subject as they are not quite close enough to garner an intimate look at her face. They are located at relatively uninvolved stance, leaving the subject appearing isolated and remote to reflect the media’s empathetic perception of her during that era.

Viewer gaze is essential in determining the power dynamic between the photographic subject and its audience. When describing a photograph, we can reflect on the angle of interaction to inform the line of sight. By examining the diving board photo, it is evident that viewers hold a relatively neutral line of sight with a slightly privileged gaze. They are, therefore, objective bystanders in Diana's life and examine her from the same privileged perspective as those media outlets desperately attempting to force themselves into her personal experiences.

Getty Images. (1997). Princess Diana on board the "Jonikal" yacht in 1997. API/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images