This week on Royally Us, royal photographer Chris Jackson opens up about photographing the royal family for more than two decades.
“You can often find yourself in these incredible historic moments. As a royal photographer you’re quite present in the moment, even behavior and decorum and all of those other elements are so important,” Jackson tells Us while promoting his new book, Modern Majesty: The British Royal Family Today. “There’s definitely elements of protocol that go into the job and certainly when you’re traveling abroad and the royals are meeting heads of state and things like that, there’s ways that things happen and hopefully that knowledge and that experience makes you a better photographer over the years.”
The Getty Images photog shares several behind-the-scenes moments and photographs throughout the book, including an emotional 2025 outing with Kate Middleton as she visited Royal Marsden Hospital in London, where she underwent nine months of chemotherapy in 2024.
“I visited the Royal Marsden with her at an engagement and I will never forget as she’s kind of walking up the stairs, she literally glanced up, and I felt in that millisecond, there were definitely some memories of that place; I would imagine having gone there for treatment,” Jackson explains. “It was a pretty salient time in her life and clearly meeting the doctors and the nurses who knew her and the patients she really wanted to see there, it was really emotional.”
Jackson writes in the book that Kate’s “recuperation has clearly involved an almost spiritual bond with nature and the environment,” but added that her bond with her husband, Prince William and their children — Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, 10, and Prince Louis, 7 — was an important part of her recovery.
“Family is obviously really important to all of them and they’ll always prioritize that,” Jackson says. “A bit of the book is about those challenges, and I think they’re important to address, but we’ve seen an amazing bounce back.”
Kate, 44, went public with her diagnosis in March 2024 and announced in January 2025 that she is officially in remission.
For a full royal recap, watch the video above.
