I've been taking selfies for as long as I can remember. Back in the early 1980s when I started taking selfies with film cameras, it was exciting because you had no idea what you were capturing until you got the film processed and you saw the prints. I used to joke to friends that I invented the selfie, but obviously that's not true. So, what IS the history of selfies? ThoughtCo. has a great article outlining this history. Folks believe that the first selfie—a daguerreotype—which is also one of the first photographs of a person, was created by American photographer Robert Cornelius in 1839. And the first mirror selfie was created by Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, in 1914, when she was 13 years old. And ThoughtCo. states that a man named Lester Wisbrod claims to be the first person to take celebrity selfies:
A Hollywood cameraman named Lester Wisbrod claims he is the first person to take celebrity selfies, (a self-taken photo of himself and a celebrity) and has been doing so since 1981.
But what about the kind of "modern selfie" that's ubiquitous today? According to The Telegraph, that seems to have been created in September 2002 when an Australian man, after a drunken night out, uploaded a photo of his busted lip to the internet. Read more about the history of the selfie here and here, and enjoy these two selfies I took with my best friend, one is from 1986 and one is from last week!
