Long before front-facing cameras and social feeds, people were already turning the lens on themselves.
In 1839, Robert Cornelius stepped into his family’s Philadelphia yard, uncovered a homemade camera, and sat motionless for more than ten minutes. The result is widely considered the first photographic selfie. It used no filters, or instant preview. Just patience and curiosity.
Photography itself was brand new. Louis Daguerre had only recently introduced the daguerreotype, and most images were stiff studio portraits. Cornelius did something quietly radical. He pointed the camera inward.
By the early 1900s, self-portraits became more playful. Mirrors helped. So did simpler cameras. In 1914, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, then a teenager, snapped a mirror selfie with a Kodak Brownie, sounding remarkably modern in her self-aware notes about the photo.
Joseph Byron took what is recognizable as a selfie way back in 1909, from the rooftop of a building in New York.
What these early selfies reveal is simple. The urge to document ourselves did not arrive with smartphones. It arrived with photography itself.
The tools changed. The impulse did not.
Learn more about early photography on HistoryFacts.
