Project Statement

The First Selfie is a reproduction of what is considred to be the first photographic “selfie”. The Oxford Dictionaries announced in 2013 that their word of the year was “selfie”. They defined this as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”.  If the meaning of a “selfie” can be distilled to a photograph taken of oneself, then this Robert Cornelius self-portrait can be considered the world’s first “selfie” from 1839.  With the help from some wonderful librarians at The Library of Congress, this is a photograph of me holding a reproduction of the original image.  This reproduction of the “selfie” is printed to its original scale.