Selfies through time
Here’s how the idea of the photographic self-portrait has evolved through the years.
1839: American artist Robert Cornelius took the first self-portrait photo on daguerreotype. The tech was so rudimentary, he had enough time to click the button, step in front of the frame and do a cross-armed pose.
2002: Digital cameras got popular, allowing users to experiment with turning the lens on to themselves. The first use of ‘selfie’ appears in Australia.
2003: Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NEC released cellphones with front-facing cameras for video-conferencing.
2010: Apple’s iPhone 4 debuted with a selfie camera, jumpstarting a revolution.
2013: Selfie beat twerk and bitcoin to become the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year.
2014: Ellen DeGeneres got Bradley Cooper to take a star-studded photo at the Oscars. It became Twitter’s most shared photo. The selfie stick was invented in the same year.
2015: The Selfie World Championship debuts, with competition in disciplines such as pout, and mirror selfies.
2017: A study finds that 33% of users in India decide which phone to buy based largely on its selfie camera.
2018: David Slater wins a long-running lawsuit, allowing himself to be identified as the creator of this selfie of a macaque. Slater set up the camera and coaxed animals to use it. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed the copyright belonged to the animal that had taken the picture.
2019: Photo sharing and online selfie databases are being used to improve facial-recognition algorithms, raising issues of privacy and surveillance.
2020 and beyond: Selfie-authenticated payment tech is already rolling out in China and Europe. You’ll soon be able to pay by blinking into your cameraphone. Meanwhile, companies are experimenting with phones that have no front lens – the display screen acts as the camera. Other brands are considering putting a second screen on the back of the phone.
