He’s a good-looking young man, slouching on a bed in his Brooklyn apartment, taking a selfie. Oh, has he pulled out all the stops. He has mounted an old-fashioned plate camera atop a tripod. He has set up a mirror. His dark hair is tightly barbered into a stylish flip. His mustache is neatly trimmed. He is wearing a ribbed, sleeveless white undershirt.
He mugs comically for the camera but is also trying to come off cool, to get a rise out of people. He is a native of Williamsburg. He is everything we’ve come to imagine about the neighborhood since it was rebooted at the turn of this century, transmogrifying from a shabby tenement backwater to the post-hipster, faux bohemian paradise it is today.
Only this young man is not of that Williamsburg. He is of the old one. He is taking this selfie in 1935. I know this because he is my grandfather, Eli Fuchs, and to his left is the crib of his newborn daughter, Lola, my mother.
On a recent visit to my mother’s house, in New Jersey, I was going through some old boxes and was stunned to find dozens of selfies taken by her father in the thirties and forties: funny ones, straight ones, flagrantly thirst-trappy ones. Eli was a reserved, unassuming man when I knew him—a retired employee of the federal government. For most of his adult life, he worked at the Raritan Arsenal, in Middlesex County, designing, illustrating, and overseeing the printing of posters, manuals, and booklets for the U.S. Army.
I was not unaware of his artsy side. Eli was a gifted hobby photographer and painter. I have an oil-on-canvas portrait he made of me when I was around eight, its dignified medium undercut by the fact that I am wearing a goofy white seventies T-shirt with red piping. And Eli was, at times, a bit of a rascal. He subscribed to Playboy, leaving issues out in plain view of his grandchildren. As I have also discovered lately, a bit to my consternation, he took some cheesecake shots and nudes of my grandmother Tessie, when she was a young woman.
But it’s his selfies that astonish me. This happens to be an auspicious anniversary for the form. Fifteen years ago, in June, 2010, Apple brought to market the iPhone 4, the first model to include a front-facing camera. While mirror selfies were already popular, you could now more precisely arrange your pout before clicking the shutter, or strategically position your phone so that it wasn’t apparent that you were the person taking the photo. Four months later, in October, 2010, a new social-media app called Instagram launched in Apple’s App Store. This lent the selfie an immediacy: your self-portrait could be uploaded instantly from your phone to an ever-hungry feed. If you were a certain type of individual, with a certain degree of influence, it could even be monetized.
For Eli Fuchs, the selfie provided no such immediacy or audience. The actual process took a hell of a lot of work. In his early efforts, you can tell he was using a mirror to capture his reflection, and he no doubt carefully timed his efforts based on the light available to him. Then he had to develop his film. My mother, who is now ninety, remembers that, even though space was tight at home, “he kept a darkroom with trays holding all sorts of different solvents. Then there was a whole drying situation, with the prints hung on a line.”
At some point, Eli became acquainted with the shutter-release cable, which allowed him to forgo the mirror and simply point the camera at himself. A little later on, he acquired a 35-mm. camera, meaning he could shoot outdoors without lugging around his cumbersome rig: the plate camera, the tripod, and the dark cloth he sometimes draped over his head.
By the nineteen-forties, when he was in his thirties, Eli was clearly more confident in his looks. In photos from this period, his thin frame has filled out, his hair is pomaded, and his mustache is of the pencil-thin, Clark Gable variety. The mugging of his early selfies has vanished. He’s posing dreamily and shirtless in a hammock. He’s looking dapper in a peak-lapel suit with a boutonnière. He’s propping an elbow atop a low wall, holding himself in an “about the author” pose. Sometimes he uses both the shutter-release cable and a mirror—you can tell because, as he holds the cord, he is also casting his eyes slightly to the side, to check out his reflection.
In one such cord-and-mirror series, he is nattily dressed in a plaid oxford shirt and a necktie. He tries out a sly grin, then a cheeky wink. Then the shirt comes off and the stomach is sucked in. As I leafed through these pictures, I was flabbergasted to discover that he did not always carry out these shoots in solitude. Sometimes he had a little helper: my five-year-old mom, who, in one photo, stands behind him in a cap-sleeve dress, a bow in her hair, pressing the shutter-clicker while he smolders for the mirror, wearing only boxer briefs.
What’s striking about Eli’s selfies is how much they rhyme with today’s. His intent, at least where these photos were concerned, was not artistic. He was not out to create a self-portrait à la Rembrandt or Frida Kahlo. He was certainly capable of doing so; on my office wall hangs an elegant ink-wash self-portrait in which he sits at his desk at the Raritan Arsenal, reviewing page layouts and debonairly holding a cigarette. No, in his photographic selfies, Eli Fuchs was simply a young Brooklyn dude trying to create an idealized image of himself—to picture himself as a star.
My mother recalls that he was dissatisfied with his “hook nose.” This term was as loaded back then as it was descriptive. In James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan” trilogy of novels from the nineteen-thirties, set in Chicago’s Irish American South Side, the rough-hewn characters repeatedly refer to Jews as “hooknoses,” not to mention “sheenies,” and, my favorite, “noodle-soup drinkers.”
