In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Long History of the “Selfie”
  • Marcy J. Dinius (bio)

Two years ago, the Oxford Dictionaries announced “selfie”—defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”—as the word of the year.1 As the blog announcement explained of the committee’s choice, “Other words were considered … but selfie was the runaway winner.” Indeed, it continued, “It seems like everyone who is anyone has posted a selfie somewhere on the Internet. If it is good enough for the Obamas or The Pope, then it is good enough for Word of the Year.” Typically, the “Word of the Year” designation is based on the cultural frequency of a word’s use, so it is curious that the 2013 Word of the Year announcement focuses on the Obamas and Pope Francis having taken selfies as justification for the decision. The announcement prompted a history of the “selfie” as an image and not just a word, leading to the Internet equivalent of a gold rush to unearth the very first selfie.

The Internet content aggregator BuzzFeed led the charge, posting its list of the “14 Most Important Selfies of All Time” the day after the OED’s announcement. The list’s author. Chris Johanesen (“BuzzFeed VP of Product”), generated the search in response to the question “Who created the best selfies of all time?” and opened the list to self-portraiture in any medium.2 Consequently, Robert Cornelius—the first [End Page 445] person ever to take a photographic self-portrait “waaaaay back in 1839,” as Johanesen puts it—comes in dead last at #14. (Frida Kahlo was #1, in case you were curious.) Other websites, however, kept closer to the OED’s definition and almost immediately Cornelius became a darling of the Internet, recognized not only for his pioneering achievement but also for his roguish, protohipster hotness3 (fig. 1).


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Figure 1.

Robert Cornelius, Self-portrait, 1839.

Daguerreo-type Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-5001.

Hotness aside, Cornelius earned the designation as the originator of the selfie for being one of the first people in the world to experiment with the photographic process pioneered by Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre and announced to the world in Paris on August 19, 1839. Cornelius and his fellow Philadelphian and collaborator Joseph Saxton learned Daguerre’s method from one of the many newspapers or magazines in which it was published and hailed as nothing short of one of humankind’s greatest achievements.4 According to Carol Johnson, former photography curator at the Library of Congress (which now owns the Cornelius self-portrait and makes it freely available in the public domain), Cornelius “fashion[ed] a camera from a tin box and an opera lens” in October or November of 1839.5 “Working outdoors in sunlight to minimize exposure time, [he] placed his camera on a sturdy support, removed the lens cover, sat still for several minutes, and replaced the lens cover” (339). The outcome was the image that you see reprinted here. The long exposure time of the earliest daguerreotypes—due to a combination of early practitioners not yet having perfected the process’s light-sensitive chemistry or refined lens making for photography—made it possible for Cornelius to be both operator and sitter.6

From this observation, the first point I want to make is a counterintuitive one: photographic self-portraiture was born from the technological limitations of photography’s origins in the nineteenth century, not [End Page 446] from twenty-first century digital innovations in the medium that have made it seemingly ubiquitous. Created within these limitations, Cornelius’s self-portrait was also the product of an early adopter incorporating his own body into his experiment with the process. His work in the lamp-making trade gave him professional access to the materials needed to follow Daguerre’s instructions, as well as the chemical and metallurgical knowledge that enabled him to adapt them for picture making. He can be considered an amateur only in that at the time there were no professional photographers other than...

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