Reader question – Bruno Wilhan Fonseca, Gramado, RS
The first person to portray himself was the American Robert Cornelius, in October 1839. According to Stephen Perloff, editor of The Photo Review magazine, this is also considered the first photo of a person in the USA. Cornelius had to remain between three and 15 minutes in front of his daguerreotype, a more primitive version of the photographic camera, to obtain the image. Some scholars, however, suggest that someone else activated the mechanism, and the first selfie would actually have been taken by Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard in 1840. Bayard claimed to have invented the camera before contemporaries Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, but it was never recognized. Therefore, his self-image is a protest: he pretends to be drowning.
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