Photo Portraits

The very first photo portraits, especially those produced by the daguerreian process were treasured for their ability to capture the aspects of facial appearance that constitute family resemblance.

Invented by the French painter Louis Daguerre in the late 1830s, daguerreotypes, with their “cold, mirror-like appearance” were well-suited to capturing exacting likenesses of sitters.

Portraits were the most commonly produced type of photographs in the first decades of photography, comprising an estimated 95% of surviving daguerreotypes.

Photo Portrait of Louis Daguerre

Source: http://blog.oup.com/2013/11/selfies-history-self-portrait-photography/

That portraiture was a key use of the earliest camera technologies suggest a quite understandable human interest in other humans. Where earlier portraits were often commissioned and carried out by artists who had to work with subjects at several sittings in order to capture more accurately the features of the subjects, photography offered a more true-to-life image. Despite the change of medium, these portraits seemed to still be generally posed in a traditional portrait style that can be understood as a person's performance of their best selves: well-dressed, elegantly posed, and graceful in expression.

In this way self-portraits today have not changed: selfies are often posed, and are still meant to portray the subject in an attractive light, but are to be received by viewers as if the image captured actual reality.