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Is this one of the oldest selfies in existence?
Bonus: Also see the selfie taken by a teenage girl and shared with her friend… in 1914.
SELFIES HAVE BECOME so popular, the word was added to the Oxford dictionary in August.
(A selfie is 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.”)
But selfies are as old as portable cameras. Possibly the oldest selfie in existence was taken by an early Edwardian woman in 1900 with a Kodak Brownie box camera. Here’s the picture below, from Wikipedia.
One of the first selfies ever taken by a teenager and sent to a friend was snapped by Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in 1914.
She was 13 at the time and wrote to the recipients, “I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling.”
Here’s that photo, again from Wikipedia. She’s almost making the now-popular “sparrow face.”
- Alyson Shontell
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