History of The Self Portrait

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Way back in November 2006, former party besties Paris Hilton and Britney Spears snapped a couple of seemingly innocuous photos together. They were pre-“selfie” selfies, evidenced by the telltale arm reaches just within the frames. The images themselves were largely unremarkable until three years ago, when Hilton tweeted them out to her 17 million followers, claiming she and Spears “invented the selfie.”

Of course, the Twittersphere had a field day. Hilton’s mentions were promptly filled with a slew of images of people–including everyone from Madonna and Paul McCartney to Bill Nye–doing it first. Some were clearly wielding disposable or Polaroid cameras while others had positioned themselves directly in front of mirrors or run into frames just in time to get snapped.

But were any of these photos, including Paris and Britney’s, legit “selfies,” according to the modern definition? In 2013, when the Oxford Dictionaries officially recognized “selfie” as its word of the year, they defined it as a “photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”

Since Instagram et al. didn’t exist back in the days of Paris and Britney’s forays to Hyde and Nacional, those shots may not even be selfies, in the strictest, contemporary sense of the word. There is, however, a good chance the images were snapped with a smartphone; paparazzi pics of mid-aughts-era Hilton often show her clutching a bedazzled BlackBerry or Sidekick.

But if we’re simply talking about taking a picture of oneself, then Hilton is most definitely not the co-inventor of the selfie. That honor belongs to Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphia-based photography enthusiast who, like many early explorers of the medium, used himself as a subject. The circa-1839 photo in which he appears is in fact widely recognized as the first photographic portrait.

Cornelius reportedly set up a camera in the back of his family’s shop, removed the lens cap, and ran into the frame before sitting down for a minute to pose. That’s not exactly grinning against a banquette backdrop, but it is the true precursor to the current era of everyone simultaneously acting as both model and photographer.

And while Cornelius was never going to beat Hilton in the perfect pose department, he does appear to have inadvertently mastered a certain disaffected cool–pretty priceless in this day and age.

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createdAt:Fri, 21 Jun 2019 13:41:05 +0000
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