A photograph from the Victorian era has entered the running for the title of history's earliest mirror selfie, according to Artnet News.

That is the modest claim of a recently highlighted image whose provenance and date the art-trade outlet is now examining. If authenticated, the picture would push the origins of the mirror selfie — a genre that Oxford Dictionaries named Word of the Year in 2013 — back by more than a century and a half.

When did mirror selfies begin?

The mirror self-portrait in photography is older than most readers probably assume. The medium itself is only as old as 1839, when Louis Daguerre unveiled the daguerreotype in Paris. Within a decade, photographers were already turning the camera on themselves.

Robert Cornelius, an American chemist, produced one of the earliest surviving self-portraits in October 1839, though he posed outdoors without a mirror. Hippolyte Bayard, working in France through the 1840s, made self-images of similar vintage.

The mirror variant — the specific form now under discussion — has its own thin trail of antecedents. Photographers of the 1850s and 1860s occasionally captured their own reflections in shop windows and polished surfaces, partly out of necessity (a lone operator had no other way to verify focus and exposure) and partly out of vanity.

What makes a Victorian mirror photo a candidate?

A mirror selfie, properly defined, demands three: the photographer, a reflective surface, and a frame in which the camera itself is visible in the reflection. The third criterion is the hardest to satisfy cleanly, because pointing a lens at a mirror tends to produce an image dominated by the apparatus, not the face.

The Artnet piece highlights a Victorian-era print that meets these criteria — or appears to — with one significant caveat: the precise date of exposure remains under examination. Until that is fixed, the photograph can only be considered a candidate, not a record-holder.

Why does the claim matter?

The mirror selfie now lives in the imagination as a smartphone-era gesture, the kind of image associated with a raised arm and a ring of flash. That contemporary form dates to the mid-2000s, once front-facing phone cameras became common.

To find a credible ancestor in the 1860s or earlier is to remind viewers that the genre's grammar — reflection, raised arm, self-regard — long predates its digital packaging. It also complicates the casual assumption that self-imaging is a recent habit, fed by social media and little else. People have been doing it since the technology allowed, which is to say since the 1840s.

What is Artnet News actually arguing?

The outlet is not declaring a winner. It is floating the photograph as a candidate and inviting authentication. That is the right caution. Dating early photographs is notoriously difficult: processes evolved quickly, retouching was common, and prints circulated widely without clear attribution.

If the dating holds, the photograph joins a short list of pre-1900 mirror self-portraits and likely takes the top spot. If it does not, the discussion will have done useful service anyway — it has nudged a curious public to look more carefully at what sits in attics and museum drawers.

Authentication efforts, and any institutional response from museums or auction houses, will decide whether the photograph settles into the historical record or remains a charming curiosity. Either outcome tells us something about how the earliest photographic experiments with the self are still being uncovered, one frame at a time.