Because, well... it's kind of fun?

The word 'selfie', used to describe a photographic self-portrait, seems to have been coined around 2002 (that's the date Wikipedia gives for its first electronic or print appearance). But the history goes back a looooot further than that... let's have a look at some of the milestones:

2012: First selfie taken on Mars

NASA's Curiousity rover took this one; it was then shared on Facebook, in classic selfie fashion. The lens was apparently a bit dusty!

1966: First space selfie

Buzz Aldrin took a selfie while on EVA from Gemini 12, in 1966. Michael Collins took an earlier one on Gemini 10, inside the capsule.

1914: First (known) selfie by a teenager

The handheld 'Brownie' camera in 1900 led to the possibility of home selfies, taken by pointing the camera at a mirror. This one was taken by Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia - yes, that Anastasia - who wrote to a friend, "I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling."

1839: First photographic selfie

Arguably the first 'true' selfie, Robert Cornelius took this by setting up the camera, running into shot, and waiting there until the exposure had finished.

Prior to this point, we're into the realm of self-portraiture, but frankly it's the same thing.

1548: First oil-paint selfie by a woman

Caterina van Hemessen inscribed her picture with the words 'I Caterina van Hemessen have painted myself / 1548 / Her aged 20', which is kind of adorable. She wasn't the first woman to paint herself - there are apparently earlier manuscript paintings - but she was the first to do so in what we think of as painting. Almost all women painters have followed her lead and created their own self-portraits, which isn't as common among men.

1433: First Western panel selfie after antiquity

A probable self-portrait of Jan van Eryk. The description would once have read 'first panel selfie', but that would completely neglect the Asian history of the art-form, as well as the fact that classical European artists also painted, though their work is largely lost.

ca. 950: First English selfie

Saint Dunstan, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 950, drew himself grovelling before Christ, with the inscription "Remember, I beg you, merciful Christ, to protect Dunstan, and do not permit the storms of the underworld to swallow me up."

Now we're going to take a huge leap back, abandoning the realm of paint entirely. It's sculpture time!

1365 BC: First known named selfie

On the right is Bak, chief sculptor to Pharoah Akhenaten (husband of Nefertiti and father of Tutankhamun). On the left is his wife. The general consensus is that her body has been stylised in the Amarna Style of the time, while his is probably an accurate depiction.

And that's almost the complete history. I can't (on a brief browse) find an earlier self-portrait of an artist whose name is know.

But...

30,000-10,000 BC: First selfies (maybe)

The so-called Venus Figurines (the picture is the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, the earliest piece of ceramic-work in the world) are usually taken to be either goddess figures, or images of female beauty, Paleolithic incarnations of the male gaze. But there is an alternate theory: that they are self-portraits of the women depicted. Without a mirror, you can't see your own head, so you shrink it down; your feet taper away from you, so you narrow the legs almost to points. This is far from the only way to explain the stylised design of the Venuses, but I think it is the most thought-provoking.

If it's true, then these aren't sculptures of what these women looked like: they're sculptures of what it felt like to be them. "This is how I see myself," rendered totally literally; and if you think about it, that's still the motivation behind selfies, right down to today.

hS