Robert Cornelius – Self Portrait – 1839

The FIRST ‘Selfie’ , as well as the first ever photograph of a human being in history. Not bad for a dead guy . . .

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“Why do you like me more when I was prouder and wilder, more full of words, yet emptier?”
― Friedrich Hölderlin

Don’t quote me on this one, but I feel like I’ve been hearing/reading a lot of talk about Kim K being the inventor of the selfie. She released her book SELFISH , and whilst you can attribute the ‘success’ of her following (52.8 million and counting) to her candid take on life posting bits and bites of her online constantly, she wouldn’t be the first or last to take a picture of themselves.

Nowadays ‘selfies’ are rampant on the internet, and its quite curious to see a generation of children growing up with the notion that there is an essential need to post one’s image ‘online’ at all times. There’s a saying these days that ‘if you don’t see it on Instagram, it didn’t happen‘ – which by all standards seems a little reductive to the actual experience of life and living, don’t you find?

While Kim may have been one of the forerunners in the popularization of the ‘selfie’, and even pushing the boundaries of the process of raising your phone in front of your face and pushing a button to some form or medium that one could consider ‘art’ . . . ? ? ?

Too much self-centred attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centred attitude is the source of suffering.

-Dalai Lama

Yes, that’s what’s strange and hilarious about this whole ordeal, when in fact, if you take a look at a ‘selfie’ from the past, they are a whole lot more interesting than the run-of-the-mill duck face, booty-tooched, tiara-faced, bicep crunched, mid drift bared, grainy narcissism that is usually made to elicit some form of hype or attention; rather they are candid, curious moments immortalized by light and silver taken in a manner that is even more technically advanced and complicated than your phone or tablet.

Hope I didn’t offend anyone and their phone or tablet, but its the gosh-darn truth. And even before the advancements of the photograph in general, we had artists who painstakingly mixed pigment and with brushes artfully illuminated their souls onto canvas in what are often the best works by any artist- the self portrait, as we have come to call it.

It’s good to be selfish. But not so self-centred that you never listen to other people.

-Hugh Hefner

It would seem as a collective whole; as a community through history – we have always been fascinated by our true image, or at least, the image we leave behind of ourselves when we are gone. Perhaps its a stab at not being forgotten, or perhaps it is the artists own way of insuring they remember the times that were.

So in true E.O.F. style, we want to take a look back at the great ‘selfies’ of the past, remembering where we came from, and hopefully we can invigorate some imagination to add a flux to our inevitable futures.