Forget the gala uniform for a moment. Two days after his 21st birthday portraits stopped Denmark in its tracks, Crown Prince Christian has shown the country a completely different picture of himself: grinning into a disposable camera on the Copenhagen waterfront, a pop star at his shoulder, the harbour sparkling behind them and not a medal in sight.
The Royal House published the photographs on Saturday morning, and they come with the shortest, happiest caption of the Crown Prince’s autumn. “I have been on a trip around Copenhagen with Benjamin Hav and a couple of disposable cameras,” Christian wrote in his own words, signing the post personally. “We got far and wide, and talked about everything from birds to future dreams.” The photographs are credited to the Crown Prince and Benjamin Hav themselves, which means the heir to the throne was not just the subject of this shoot. He was half of the camera crew.
A selfie by the water, a bridge from above the canal
The lead image is a small collage of the day, presented like prints laid out on a table. In the top photograph the two men beam into the lens from a boat or quayside on the harbour, Christian in a brown zip jacket over a white t-shirt, Benjamin Hav beside him in a blue work-style shirt. Behind them, across the water, crowds stroll the Langelinie promenade and the rocks of the Little Mermaid sit in the sunshine, the most visited small statue in Denmark reduced to a charming backdrop in a prince’s holiday snap. The second print looks up at the Circle Bridge, Cirkelbroen, in Christianshavn, its five masts and ring-topped cables drawn against a clean blue sky while a tour boat slides underneath.
It is a deliberate kind of informality, and it lands because the contrast is so fresh. Readers who saw Christian turn 21 in scarlet and light blue at Amalienborg this week, in the Royal Life Guards gala uniform with the Grand Commander Cross his father had just awarded him, are now seeing the same young man two days later in a zip jacket, talking about birds. Both pictures are true. That, increasingly, is the point of this Crown Prince’s public style: the institution in one frame, the person in the next.
Why Benjamin Hav is the perfect guide
Benjamin Hav is one of the most distinctive voices in Danish popular music, a rapper and performer whose live act with his band, Benjamin Hav & Familien, earned him the GAFFA Prize for Live Name of the Year in 2023. He is funny, theatrical and proudly Copenhagen in his outlook, and pairing him with the Crown Prince makes a certain generational sense. Christian, born on 15 October 2005 and next in line to the throne after his father King Frederik X, grew up with Hav’s Denmark as his soundtrack just as surely as with the national anthem. A walk around the capital with a musician who fills halls is a neat way of saying that the future king’s Copenhagen is a living, noisy, creative city, not only a row of palaces.
The choice of disposable cameras does similar work. Film snapshots cannot be filtered, deleted or instantly approved, and everyone in the pictures knows it. The slight blur, the hard sunlight and the lopsided framing are exactly what a phone photograph would have edited away, and exactly why these frames feel honest. Royal photography has been polished for a century and a half. A prince choosing a throwaway camera is choosing candour, and the response suggests the public knows it: the post passed 19,000 likes within hours, with comments running into the dozens before breakfast was over in most Danish homes.
A birthday week that keeps giving
The outing caps a remarkable few days for the Danish court. The week began with the birthday itself, celebrated privately but marked publicly with those formal Amalienborg portraits, and it has unfolded since as a small masterclass in pacing: one formal image to record the milestone, then one loose, joyful postcard to show the man. It sits comfortably alongside the family’s recent rhythm, from royal homecomings elsewhere in Europe to the art-filled autumn of Norway’s royal tapestries returning to the Queen Sonja Art Stable, where courts have likewise mixed ceremony with warmth.
What happens to the rest of the film rolls is anyone’s guess. A carousel can only hold so much, and “we got far and wide” hints at a full day of frames still sitting in a camera bag somewhere in Copenhagen. If the Royal House develops the leftovers, Denmark will be waiting. A crown prince who talks about birds and future dreams, and then publishes the blurry proof, is building something no portrait painter can give him: a public that feels it knows him, and likes what it knows.
Photo: Kongehuset
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