Is this the first selfie ever taken?
People act like the selfie is some modern phenomenon, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
I mean, artists have been painting self-portraits for as long as theirs been a concept of art. From the very beginning of art as a form of self-expression, people have been depicting themselves. I mean, isn’t that the point of art in the first place? To make something that you feel represents yourself? The self-portrait is merely the most direct version of that phenomenon, and people have been making art out of that for literal centuries.
After all, one of the most fascinating things we can learn about someone is how they see themselves, and self-portraits are the best way of displaying it. Many people thought that this would be a phenomenon that would die out with the invention of the camera. I mean, pretty much everyone felt that the camera would spell the death of painting and drawing in general, but in this case, for portrait painters in particular, it must have been a scary, scary time.
Now, it’s never been easier to capture our likenesses. Pretty much all of us have a supercomputer in our pocket that contains a camera better than the vast majority of the ones used by the photographers of history. This is probably the reason why people find selfies a modern phenomenon, a facet of the so-called “narcissism” of modern times. Then, a photo went viral claiming to be the first selfie ever taken, one that went a lot further back than the 21st century.
A photo that claims to have been taken in 1957.
So, was this the first selfie ever taken?
There’s a delightful simplicity to this photo.
A handsome young man crouches in a rural yard. A few feet away is a wooden fence, on the other side is a leafless tree and an endless expanse of field. There are many photos like this, but this one is clearly not being taken of the young man, because he is quite clearly taking the photo of himself, himself. This is clear from the first thing that most eyes will be drawn to in the photo, the long wooden pole he’s using to operate the camera with.
If this were the earliest known selfie, then it would earn that title with aplomb. After all, it is someone taking a photo of themselves, by themselves, and in this particular case, he’s doing so in a pleasingly retro way. However, the truth of the matter is that this is not the first selfie. Not by a long shot. Not because the photo isn’t legit, although there isn’t a lot of information about it, so it may well be a hoax, but because we in fact do know what the first selfie is.
It came over a hundred years before that photo was supposedly taken, and it’s of the American chemist and photography hobbyist Robert Cornelius. In 1839, Cornelius got his hands on an early camera and set it up in a backroom of his family’s shop in Philadelphia. He removed the cap, then posed in front of the lens for ten to fifteen minutes while the camera took his photo, then covered up the lens again. He then developed the picture and signed it “the first light picture ever taken, 1839”.
A photographic portrait of the person operating the camera. The selfie. A tradition so old that it literally begins with the invention of the camera. Everything old will be new again.