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Young Man Taking a Selfie, Using a Piece of Wood to Activate the Shutter, 1957
A lot of vintage and antique photographs include portraits of people taken by a photographer that is standing several feet away from the subject. But “selfies” have been around long before cellphones existed. In this image taken in 1957, we see a young man squatting down with a piece of wood to hit the shutter of a camera, so that he could have a picture of himself. Many early selfies were created with the help of a mirror, which is still a popular method today for a standard outfit of the day picture. When I first saw this picture, my first thought was that it was a selfie stick…But obviously, those did not exist back then. Hey, a plank of wood still worked out pretty well as a selfie stick, anyway.