8 Key Moments in the History of The Selfie (2024)

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8 Key Moments in the History of The Selfie? ›

There's a lot of debate regarding who took the first selfie ever, but Robert Cornelius is in the Guinness World Records as the prime candidate. He used the daguerreotype technique in 1839 in his family's lamp and chandelier shop to capture his own face. He then wrote on the back: The first light picture ever taken.

There's a lot of debate regarding who took the first selfie ever, but Robert Cornelius is in the Guinness World Records as the prime candidate. He used the daguerreotype technique in 1839 in his family's lamp and chandelier shop to capture his own face. He then wrote on the back: The first light picture ever taken.

In 1839, Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, produced a daguerreotype of himself which ended up as one of the first photographs of a person. Because the process was slow, he was able to uncover the lens, run into the shot for a minute or more, and then replace the lens cap.

In the same way that self-portraits clue us into the social, cultural, and historical context of the artist, selfies are also filled with diverse symbolic markers. People find ways to leave their mark and this mark will tell us more than what we see at face-value.

If the #selfie hashtag first appeared in 2004, it was the release of the iPhone 4 in 2010 that saw the pictures go viral. Three years later, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned “selfie” word of the year. We use selfies for a variety of purposes, ranging from the social to the professional.

However, the word 'selfie' was only founded in 2002, when an Australian man, Nathan Hope, got drunk at his 21st birthday and posted a picture of his stitched lip with the caption “sorry about the focus, it was a selfie”. And then, there was no looking back.

The world's first “selfie,” a self-portrait taken by Cornelius in 1839. Prints and Photographs Division. A 30-year-old man stood alone in the yard of his family's Philadelphia gas lighting business. The year was 1839, and it was late October or early November.

The world's oldest photograph was taken in 1826 by French physicist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It is a view from the window of Niépce's estate in Burgundy, France and is the first surviving photograph of its kind. The image is a blurry, distorted view of the landscape outside of Niépce's window.

Contrary to what is widely shared online, the first selfie was actually taken by French photographer Hippolyte Bayard, and not by American pioneer photographer Robert Cornelius. According to Dr. James McArdle, Bayard's self portraits are at least four months older than Cornelius'.

The word "selfie" first appeared in a post in an online forum in 2002. An Australian evidently invented the word "selfie" to describe a photo he took of himself after getting drunk and falling down the steps. Then, in 2004, the photo site Flickr began using "selfie" as a tag for people taking photos of themselves.

What do selfies reveal? ›

Conscientiousness was negatively related to displaying a private location in the selfie background, maybe indicating participants' caution regarding their privacy. Finally, duckface selfies were related to neuroticism, whereas openness was associated with selfies displaying emotional positivity.

A mobile phone held up to take a selfie (photo of the person holding the phone or camera). Generally represented as a disembodied arm holding a mobile phone.

Early selfies

Although self-portraiture has a long history, the first known photographic selfie was a time-consuming effort by chemist Robert Cornelius in 1839. Around the same time, Hippolyte Bayard was testing his photographic process with self-portraits before showing it to the French academy of science.

The act of taking and sharing selfies has become widely popular due to digital cameras, the internet, the ubiquity of social media platforms like Facebook and, of course, because of people's endless fascination with their own image.

Selfie culture is out of control is a common claim that some people make to criticize the practice of taking and posting self-portraits online, usually on social media platforms. They argue that selfie culture is a sign of millennial narcissism, self-obsession, and entitlement.

The word "selfie" first appeared in a post in an online forum in 2002. An Australian evidently invented the word "selfie" to describe a photo he took of himself after getting drunk and falling down the steps. Then, in 2004, the photo site Flickr began using "selfie" as a tag for people taking photos of themselves.

Mathi Maaran, the nephew of National Award-winning director Vetri Maaran, who will be making his debut as a director with 'Selfie', says he got the inspiration for the plot of the film from a conversation he had with a person who had worked as a broker, selling college seats while in college.

Perhaps the first front-facing camera on a hand-held device was the Game Boy Camera, released in Japan in February 1998. The Game Boy Camera was an attachment for Game Boy. The first front-facing camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.