Here's the whole idea in one breath: for almost all of history, making a picture of yourself was rare, slow and expensive — and then the camera in your pocket made it instant, free and endless. That single shift changed not just how many self-images exist, but what they're even for.
Start with What It Used to Cost
Think about Rembrandt. Over his lifetime he painted, drew and etched himself something like ninety times — and each one was hours, days, of careful work in front of a mirror, mixing pigment by hand, watching his own face age across forty years of canvases. Van Gogh did the same in a poorer, fiercer way: dozens of self-portraits because he couldn't always afford a model, so he used the one face that was always available. A self-portrait, back then, was a serious thing. You only made one if it was worth the labour, and it survived because it was rare.
Then photography arrived in the 1800s, and even an early photo still took real effort — you sat dead still while a slow plate exposed, you paid a studio, you got one careful image. Faster than painting, but still precious. The big break came later: a camera in every phone, a front-facing lens, and a screen that shows you yourself before you press the button. Suddenly the self-image costs nothing and takes a second.
What We Gained, and What We Quietly Lost
The toy makes the trade visible. Drag toward the selfie end and the count rockets up while the effort-per-image drops to almost nothing — that's the gain: anyone, anywhere, can now picture themselves, on their own terms, without a wealthy patron or a trained hand. That's genuinely new in human history.
But watch the other number fall too. When each image cost a week of painting, every choice in it meant something — the pose, the light, the look in the eye. When an image costs a second, most of them mean almost nothing; they're not about anything, they just record a face that happened to be there. The interesting question for this whole concept is hiding in that gap: now that making a picture of yourself is free, what makes one of them actually worth looking at?