Unit5-Part1-Reading

The Selfie Trend

Each time we log on to social media the faces of our friends greet us on the screen in their selfie pictures

Sometimes they are at a party or in front of a famous landmark in a foreign city

Sometimes they are sitting in a cafe or they are showing off their new clothes or hairstyle

We love taking pictures of ourselves and sharing them online

We post our selfies constantly when we are on holiday or when we are hanging out with friends and doing fun activities

And we wait for likes and comments from our friends

Today most people have smartphones so taking selfies is quick and easy

But self -portraits are not new

Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt and other famous artists made drawings or paintings of themselves

with the help of mirrors and

Self -portrait photography began in the early 1800s a

Man in America named Robert Cornelius produced the first self -portrait photo in

1839 a few months after the invention of photography

It was the first selfie in the world

It was also one of the first photographs of a person

With the invention of portable cameras in

1888 taking self -portrait photos became easier a

British woman took one of the oldest selfies with a box camera in front of a mirror in 1900

Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia took the first self -portrait photo to send it to a friend in

1914 when she was 13

She took the photo looking at a mirror

Today people across the world take 93 million selfies each day and they post more than

17 million selfies to social media sites every week a

Person between the ages of 18 and 25 post about 100 selfies in a year

But people older than the age of 50 take more selfies than young people