This guy in Streetview is standing near the spot where the world’s first #selfie portrait was taken in 1839.

Robert Cornelius was one of the first people to try to reproduce Louis Daguerre’s photographic technique after news of the breakthrough reach Philadelphia. A chemist working at his family’s gas lighting company, Cornelius started experimenting with different chemical combinations until he found a way to reduce exposure times so that a person to sit still long enough for a portrait. In October 1839 he took a picture himself “in the yard back of his store and residence, (old) 176 Chestnut Street, above Seventh (now number 710), in Philadelphia,” according to an oral history published half a century later (PDF). Cornelius recounts:

It was our business to make a great variety of articles of plated metal. Very soon afterwards, I made in the factory a tin box, and bought from McAllister, 48 Chestnut Street, a lens about two inches in diameter, such as was used for opera purposes. With these instruments I made the first likeness of myself and another one of some of my children, in the open yard of my dwelling, sunlight bright upon us, and I am fully of the impression that I was the first to obtain a likeness of the human face.

Remarkably, in 2014, the Cornelius and Co. building is still there on Chestnut Street, though barely recognizable, with an extra floor on top and extensive facade changes. It’s a discount drug store. The back is the narrow alley named Ionic Street, home to dumpsters and people wanting to stay out of sight. The yard is to the right of these dumpsters. With #selfie such a popular hashtag, Cornelius’s picture has circulated on a lot of internet lists as the “world’s first selfie.” But it’s historical significance is far greater: it is the first photographic portrait of our species. I’m not typically one for hyperbole, but we humans started seeing ourselves differently after that portrait.

I originally assumed the building on the right of the alley stood where the yard had been but a satellites turns up a surprise: the yard is still there! Looking at the 710 property from above, the buildings facing Chestnut and Ionic are separate–with a large open space in between! There are two sections that look almost to be garden beds.

Yo Philly, how has 710 Chestnut Street not been snatched up and turned into a museum of photographic history? The first floor could focus on nineteenth century Philadelphia innovation, with the still-existent inner courtyard turned into a tourist destination? It would be like catnip. What self-respecting modern tourist wouldn’t walk the few blocks from Independence Hall to take their picture at the very site of the world’s first selfie? I know Philly typically doesn’t respect any history past 1776 but come on!

Update March 2021: Katie Park in the Inquirer reporting an all-too-predictable story: Philly L&I approves demolition of Chestnut Street properties that preservationists had tried to protect. It’s not Cornelius’s house at 710 but it’s just a few doors down the block at 730–732. The article has some great info from Justin Brooks, a lawyer who’s been trying to organize historic recognition for the 600, 700, and 800 blocks of Chestnut. One tidbit: in 1891 Chestnut Street was widened by the city, requiring “building owners to tear down their own facades to move farther back.” (You could write a tome on Philly history that’s been lost to road widening projects but at least this was “just” the 700 block facades.)

The photo reminds me of my New York Times moment, when the photographer insisted on a few shots of me holding a guitar, which made it onto the “CyberTimes” cover, but the paragraph describing the movement is a good, concise one:

Called “emerging” or “postmodern” churches, they are diverse in theology and method, linked loosely by Internet sites, Web logs, conferences and a growing stack of hip-looking paperbacks. Some religious historians believe the churches represent the next wave of evangelical worship, after the boom in megachurches in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Still, much of the article talks about the superficial stuff, what Jordan Cooper calls the “candles and coffee” superficiality of some of a form-only emergent church style. There certainly is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Julie read the article and was really turned off to the dumb side of the emergent church:

Honey, I just can’t get with it. I empathize somewhat, but I’m a traditionalist, so I can’t say I don’t take just as much offense at “borrowing” Catholic and Orthodox spiritual practices as I do at the importing of the sweatlodge ripped off from Native Americans. I’m not saying that all Emerging Church groups do rip off, they’re trying to find something legitimate, I can see that. It’s just that they are settling for part of the truth without looking at the whole picture. Lectio Divina is part of a larger Catholic theology and really shouldn’t be divorced from it, etc. I empathize with the unchurched and the unfriendliness of traditional churches to the completely unchurched. I don’t know what the answer is, but this movement just strikes me as bizarre. Of course, again, I’m coming from a traditional Catholic perspective here, so “church” to me means something utterly different than to many, especially the unchurched and evangelicals, for example, who see worship as more open and dynamic and involving the heart, not so much about form. I guess in the end, it’s just that some of this Emerging Church stuff is just too “cool.” I’m glad that it puts some people in touch with God, and that’s a good thing. But church should never be too cool or too comfy or too sentimental. It should challenge too. What I’d like to hear in one of these articles is how these new forms and this new movement actually challenge people to commit to Christ and to change their lives. Hmmm.

So true, so true. What I’ve wondered is whether traditional Quakerism has a threshing function to offer the emergent-church seekers: we have the intimate meetings (partly by design, partly because our meetings are half-empty), the language of the direct experience with God, the warning against superficiality. I can hear Julie laughing at me saying this, as Friends have largely lost the ability to challenge or articulate our faith, which is the other half of the equation. But I’d like to believe we’re due for some generational renewals ourselves, which might bring us to the right place at the right time to engage with the emergent churchers and once more gather a new people.