What is a Selfie?

By Editor Colin Dixon
Edited and published by Yvette Depaepe, the 28th of June 2024

Untitled by Michelle Degryse

Selfie is slang for Self-Portrait.
It is used today to infer a photographic self-portrait taken on a mobile device with a front-facing camera and shared via social media.
In 2013. "Selfie" was word of the year in the Oxford English Dictionary. The inclusion of front facing cameras on smart phones and the popularity of social media sites like Instagram and Facebook have made the selfie the most popular type of photography with hundreds of millions of selfies posted each day on the internet.

THE HISTORY OF SELF PORTRAITS

Photographic self-portrait by Robert Cornelius, 1839

Unidentified woman taking her picture in a mirror, c. 1900

Crewman of a German, World War 1 aircraft takes a picture with a camera attached to a wing-strut.

In 1839, Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, produced a daguerreotype of himself which ended up as one of the first photographs of a person. Because the process was slow, he was able to uncover the lens, run into the shot for a minute or more, and then replace the lens cap. Little did he know he had invented the selfie.

In early 1900’s another technique was using a mirror and stabilizing the camera either on a nearby object or on a tripod while framing via a viewfinder at the top of the box, ]Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, at the age of 13, was one of the first teenagers to take her own picture using a mirror to send to a friend in 1914.

During the 1970s, photographic self-portraiture flourished when affordable instant cameras created a new medium of self-expression, and allowing amateurs to learn photography with immediate results. This was another move towards today's selfies.

In the 1960’s to the 1980’s Photo Booth Selfies as we would now call them became popular. Their intended use was for us to produce images of ourselves for passports and other official documents but they were also used by all of us for the production of images of ourselves and friends.

SOCIAL MEDIA POPULARITY
Selfies have been popular on social media. Instagram has over 70 million photos tagged with the hashtag #selfie.

Social media apps like Instagram and Facebook encourage people to take selfies with features like Geofilters, hashtag linking of related topics, and picture stories. Geofilters allow people to take selfies with overlays that can be comedic, altering your selfie image and there are also filters to change your appearance. Geotagging is the ability to show where you are located. Instagram boasts 500 million daily active users of its self-promotion,

Of course on 1x we have many amazing artists who use selfies as their style/creativity or use pictures of people taking selfies to create their art for us all to enjoy. Here are some of our selfie artists creations