In October of 1839 a 30-year-old amateur photographer and chemist named Robert Cornelius set up his camera outside, close to his family’s lighting fixture store in Philadelphia. He removed the lens cap, ran over and sat in front of the camera for about a minute, and then put the lens cap back. He had just taken what is generally believed to be the first photographic portrait.
This is the photograph. Take a minute and give it a good look:
This is a disconcertingly modern image, in almost every way. It shows a handsome young man with piercing eyes focused on something just a little to the side and behind the camera. Those eyes betray an intelligence and intensity; he is what we would now call very photogenic. He is a little off-center, leaning a bit, his arms folded, his body language relaxed but careful. His hair is longish, wavy and disheveled, and he looks as if he hasn’t shaved for a day or two. The cut of his coat, especially the high collar, mark his time and place, but otherwise he could be an indie musician in Brooklyn, or a graduate political science student in Chicago, in a picture snapped last week.
There is something unmistakably cinematic here, in the framing, the gaze, the pose. This is a snapshot of a moment of a story that is unfolding. Everything suggests a world just outside the frame of the image, things going on just beyond our vision, sounds we very nearly can hear. He has places to go and things to do, Robert does, just as soon as the daguerreotype exposure is complete.
Compare this photo to other early self-portraits: Antoine Francois Jean Claudet looking pensive in the early 1840s, Jean-Gabriel Eynard looking like he’s trying to stay awake in the mid-1840s, William Morris Grundy smoking a hookah in 1855, even this unknown guy from 1845. They are all posing, presenting themselves, creating a persona for the slow exposures of the day. They all look stilted, and in some cases a little silly. But not Cornelius; there is energy and innovation in his self-portrait; it stands out from the others like a Jean-Luc Godard film in the early 1960s stands out from the sluggish froth Hollywood was putting out.
This is one of my favorite photographs of all time. It feels like it holds secrets. As if it shows someone out of time, and one who has a growing awareness of that. He has the look of a man about to realize something important.
It turns out Robert Cornelius was a bit of a genius. He had a knack for chemistry and metallurgy, which he put to use in silver plating at his father’s lamp manufacturing company. This led to creating daguerreotype silver plates, and exploring the brand new field of photography. A couple of years after this self-portrait he opened one of the first photographic studios in the United States, but eventually drifted back to the family firm.
In this, too, the story feels modern: the brilliant artist, so creative with a new medium, who returns to the traditional world to support his family. A lucrative choice in any case; it became one of the largest lighting companies in the country and he retired wealthy.
Cornelius and his wife Harriet lived in Philadelphia all their lives, near their children and grandchildren. He died in 1893, at the age of 84. He’s buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, which sits by the Schuylkill River between the East Falls and Strawberry Mansion sections of Philadelphia.