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Two years ago, the Oxford Dictionaries announced "selfie"-defined as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website"-as the word of the year.1 As the blog announcement explained of the committee's choice, "Other words were considered ... but selfie was the runaway winner." Indeed, it continued, "It seems like everyone who is anyone has posted a selfie somewhere on the Internet. If it is good enough for the Obamas or The Pope, then it is good enough for Word of the Year." Typically, the "Word of the Year" designation is based on the cultural frequency of a word's use, so it is curious that the 2013 Word of the Year announcement focuses on the Obamas and Pope Francis having taken selfies as justification for the decision. The announcement prompted a history of the "selfie" as an image and not just a word, leading to the Internet equivalent of a gold rush to unearth the very first selfie.
The Internet content aggregator BuzzFeed led the charge, posting its list of the "14 Most Important Selfies of All Time" the day after the OED's announcement. The list's author. Chris Johanesen ("BuzzFeed VP of Product"), generated the search in response to the question "Who created the best selfies of all time?" and opened the list to selfportraiture in any medium.2 Consequently, Robert Cornelius-the first person ever to take a photographic self-portrait "waaaaay back in 1839," as Johanesen puts it-comes in dead last at #14. (Frida Kahlo was #1, in case you were curious.) Other websites, however, kept closer to the OED's definition and almost immediately Cornelius became a darling of the Internet, recognized not only for his pioneering achievement but also for his roguish, protohipster hotness3 (fig. 1).
Hotness aside, Cornelius earned the designation as the originator of the selfie for being one of the first people in the world to experiment with the photographic process pioneered by Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre and announced to the world in Paris on August 19, 1839. Cornelius and his fellow Philadelphian and collaborator Joseph Saxton learned Daguerre's method from one of the many newspapers or magazines in which it was published and hailed as nothing short of...