At the start of this week, Boris Johnson was Her Majesty's Prime Minister. Now, Liz Truss is His Majesty's Prime Minister.

On Tuesday 2022-09-06, Queen Elizabeth II met Boris Johnson to accept his resignation as Prime Minister; shortly afterwards, she asked Liz Truss to form a new administration. The Queen died on Thursday, just two days later.

This astonishing week has brought to a sad close a 70-year reign that saw social, technological and other changes on a scale that no earlier monarch experienced.

One small exemplar of the social changes comes from two photographs of the Queen. The last portrait of her was made by the PA's Jane Barlow at Balmoral on the occasion of the transfer of power from Johnson to Truss. Later, the palace used a portrait of the Queen that had been made by Jane Bown in 2006 to announce her death. It is uplifting that, where portraits from the earlier parts of the Queen's reign were almost entirely made by men (among them Beaton, Snowdon and Parkinson), the most significant last representations of her were made by women.

A side-note of photo-geekery: it is also worth recalling that the Queen was a photographer herself. She was known for using a Leica M3 gifted to her by Leica, and also a Rollei 35.

I never photographed the Queen in person, but I found the Kodachrome 64 image above in my archive. I must have taken a picture of the TV screen at the time of her Silver Jubilee. Why? I've no idea. I don't even remember taking it. It is also the only picture of the Jubilee on that roll of film. When I made that picture, I could never have dreamt that I would subsequently digitize the slide and allow anyone to see it on the internet: technological change in one picture.

The main reason I'm showing it here is that it represents the way most of us interact with the monarchy — through mass media, and especially television. An essential part of the monarchy's adaptation to changes over the last 70 years has been in relations with the media. Television was scarcely a thing for most people in the UK before her coronation: now it is pervasive, whether in the form of the box in the living room or, in its descendant forms, on the devices in our pockets.

Thank you, Your Majesty, for being the common thread in our lives and for sitting dutifully above politics for 70 years. Blue skies.