The first selfie, 1839

What the first selfie shows

A young man faces the camera, his arms crossed over a dark coat and his hair askew. The catalog calls it a head-and-shoulders self-portrait and places him slightly off-center, outdoors in the yard behind his family’s lamp and chandelier store, “peering uncertainly into the camera.” The background on the plate is a pale, empty field, and nothing of the yard shows in it.

The record’s title is “[Robert Cornelius, self-portrait; believed to be the earliest extant American portrait photo],” and a note adds “Title devised by Library staff.” It dates the plate “1839 [Oct. or Nov.]” and names Robert Cornelius (1809–1893) as the photographer. The word selfie does not appear in it. The claim it makes is narrower than the nickname: the earliest surviving American portrait photograph. It does not say this is the first photograph of a person anywhere.

The record’s notes also describe how it was made. A young Philadelphian, working outdoors “to take advantage of the light,” used “a box fitted with a lens from an opera glass,” within months of Daguerre’s August 1839 announcement of his process to the French Academy of Sciences. The notes add that early daguerreotypy needed exposures of three to fifteen minutes. They say that of the process in general; the record gives no exposure time for this plate.

What happened to the plate

The object is what the catalog calls an “approximate quarter plate daguerreotype”: an image on a polished, silvered metal plate. The visible plate measures 9 by 6.9 centimeters (about 3.5 by 2.7 inches), a little larger than a playing card, and sits in a mount of 37.6 by 29.1 centimeters (about 14.8 by 11.5 inches).

A note records an inscription on the paper backing: “The first light picture ever taken. 1839.” The record does not say who wrote it or when. The inscription claims more than the Library’s own description does. The date is not settled either. The catalog gives “1839 [Oct. or Nov.]”; the first note says “October or November, 1839,” and the second, which credits Carol Johnson’s 1999 “Photographic Material,” says “That October.”

The record lists four digital files: one from the original plate (LC-DIG-ppmsca-40464) and three from film copies of it, a color transparency, a color slide and a black-and-white copy negative. We worked from the file of the original. The Library’s record for its daguerreotype collection says the collection includes “… the first American daguerreotype, made by Robert Cornelius,” a less hedged wording than this item’s own. The item’s notes do not say when or how the plate came to the Library. Its rights statement reads: “No known restrictions on publication.”

What was repaired

Restoration removed the white spots and the haze, and the portrait comes back in color. The plate sits in a large paper mount, so we cropped it out by hand and ran the restoration without automatic cropping. The restoration was generated with Gemini nano-banana 2.1 through our lab — a different image model from the one behind the restoration tool on this site — using the same analysis and instructions as that tool.

Our first three runs, on the Library’s 1024-pixel file, gave a face that was not his; the plate we had cropped from that file measured only 478 × 636 pixels. We discarded them and started again from the Library’s full-resolution master scan, 4896 × 5748 pixels; the crop we fed the model from it measured 1503 × 2000. The three runs from the master differ from one another in the face, the hair and the color of the coat, so we show the one whose face is closest to the plate, judged by eye and by our face-similarity measurement.

Where the spots cover the face, the plate no longer holds the detail, so what you see there is the model’s reconstruction — hold the photograph to compare it with the original.

The color is inferred by the model, not recovered from the photograph, which is black and white. The brown coat, the dark neckcloth, the warm skin and the gray-beige background are the model’s guesses.