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Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey In 1840

This may be the first selfie in history. The photographer took his own picture in 1840, making it the first selfie in history.

Joseph de Prangey (1804–1892) was a French scholar and painter. His use of photography during his work in the Middle East, where he studied archaeology and ancient architecture, earned him widespread recognition as a prominent photographer.

His daguerreotypes are the oldest surviving photographs of Greece, Palestine, Italy, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. After his death in 1892, his carefully preserved photographs were discovered in his attic in the 1920s, and they were not recognized as significant works until eighty years later.

De Prangey was a wealthy scholar who studied painting in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and traveled in pursuit of historical archaeology as an amateur. He learned daguerreotypes, perhaps from its inventor, Louis Daguerre, or from Hippolyte Bayard.

De Prangey was passionate about Middle Eastern architecture and focused on the fine details of his artwork. He realized that photography was a tool that enabled him to enhance the precision of his artwork.

Between 1841 and 1844, he toured extensively in Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, producing more than 900 daguerreotypes of architectural views, landscapes, and portraits of people he encountered in their cultural environments.

After returning to France, he made watercolor and pen-and-ink studies using his photographs and published a small book of lithographs. The response to the publication discouraged him from continuing to publish his artwork, so he shifted his focus to studying the exotic plants on his estate. He drew stereoscopic images of his estate and the exotic plants he collected. Photography was not considered art during his lifetime. As it was a tool for his artistic endeavors, he made no effort to publish his photographs during his lifetime, and after using them in his artwork, he stored them in wooden boxes in his attic.