[fjsolwmv]

This is silly. Before selfies you just had to ask someone else to photograph you, either a friend or a stranger, or carry a tripod, or have n-1 people in the photo. Stealing a camera that someone asked to be photographed with is an old trope of travel literature. Vanity was not invented 10 years ago

[paganel]

> Stealing a camera that someone asked to be photographed with is an old trope of travel literature.

Me and my gf are generally against selfies and as such we distinctly remember the people that we ask for a photo at various tourist destinations (well, most of them, anyway). Yeah, that means that we don't have an endless stream of photos of the two of us taken together but that only means that the ones that we do have are even more special. Plus, like I said, we can reminisce about the actual people that took those photos of us and with whom we interacted (our favorite is a chic French lady in her 50s who offered to take a photos of us while we were on top of the Basilica San Pietro dome in Rome).

[JauntyHatAngle]

It certainly wasn't, but it also was not normalised to the extent it is today.

People laughed at selfies only 5 years ago, thinking it was a bit self-interested, now it's a normal part of the culture.

[jacobolus]

I took a college course about photographic culture in ~2008, wherin we read 150 years of essays complaining about how vain everyone was having their picture taken all the time, how they all took the same uncreative tourist photos, how sitting through people’s slideshows from their trips was a bore, how smiling at cameras is contrived and artificial, how photography wasn’t real art and didn’t require any skill, how the availability of cheap photographs was degrading the concept of a portrait, etc. etc.

This is not even close to a new phenomenon or a new complaint. The main difference is that almost everyone carries a camera all the time now, the marginal cost of taking additional photos is basically 0, and sharing pictures is easier than ever.

[ctdonath]

IIRC, someone built a "camera" that searched for photos that had been taken from that location & direction already, returning the best existing approximation instead of actually taking yet another picture.

[JauntyHatAngle]

I'm not saying its new. I'm saying its more normalised than it was.

Vanity has always existed, and as much as it's a dirty word in many's eyes, it does have a purpose.

However, for whatever reason (there are tons of reasons and probably all of them play a part), it's more normalised and common than it ever has been before, for better or worse.

[thousandautumns]

Your timeline is definitely off. Selfies were absolutely part of the cultural norm 5 years ago. I don't know when they normalized, but it was definitely between 2009 and 2011, as smartphones proliferated to become something most people had.

[JauntyHatAngle]

I suspected it might be, the years are becoming a bit muddled together in my mind when it comes to culture.

I can say with confidence that only rarely were people taking photos of only themselves 15 years ago. Today its a regular occurence.

Whether that is the vanity that has increased, the ability and proliferation of photos that has increased, or just the normalisation of the expression I don't know, because as other have said, vanity has always existed, but certainly selfies themselves are way more regular and a self-interested culture appears more normalised.

Perhaps through all of time people would be stepping on an anonymous soapbox had it existed, but it's only available today?

[ryandrake]

People still laugh at selfies. Narcissism and attention-seeking has never been normal behavior.

[pessimizer]

If somebody had a hundred pictures of themselves before the cellphone camera, you would have thought they were insane - especially if they thought you were interested in looking at them. I'm not sure my parents took more than a few hundred pictures of me the entire time I was growing up.

You've been Overton'd, and you think that something that was sold to you is something that is spontaneous or natural.

[artursapek]

It's because photos cost virtually nothing these days, compared to the film photography of your childhood.

People also have hundreds of photos of lattes, food, cats, their friends, and all kinds of other stuff that makes them happy.

[kochikame]

Taking photos of things you are interested in is, for me, fine. It's easy to take photos and we can all snap those flowers, beers, sights etc. that we like.

Taking photos of yourself, on the other hand, just seems to me to be grossly narcissistic. Like, why have thousands of photos of yourself in your phone? Super weird IMO

[null000]

This assumes the photos of yourself are for you.

Sometimes other people do genuinely want to see you in a photo. I like seeing my friends and family in pictures, and they like seeing me in pictures. You can take it to an extreme, but a lot of the, frankly, bordering on self-righteous conversation around selfies on HN tends to imply, intentionally or no, that any selfies == gross narcissism instead of, you know, a genuine way to connect to people in the present and to connect in with the past once you're a few years out.