Teen turns 7 years of selfies into mesmerizing viral video
'I was taking selfies before they were cool,' Hugo Cornellier says
Hugo Cornellier has been taking selfies virtually every day since he was 12.
“I was taking selfies before they were cool," Cornellier, a 19-year-old from Montreal, told Time magazine.
His "Selfie Everyday" project has collected roughly 2,500 selfies (Cornellier says he's missing about 50) since 2006 — most of which appear in a YouTube video that has amassed more than 2 million views since he posted it late last month.
The 90-second time-lapse film captures the myriad of facial and hair changes (Beards! Goatees! Fauxhawks!) of Cornellier's adolescent years — it's like a "Boyhood" for the social media age.
While the selfie craze may have peaked, Cornellier says he plans to continue the project indefinitely.
“This will go on forever," he told the magazine. "I never plan on stopping.”
Cornellier isn't the first selfie-taker to turn years of self-portraits into a film. Karl Baden, a Boston College photography professor, has been taking black-and-white photos of himself almost every day since Feb. 23, 1987, when he was 34.
Using the same camera and striking the same pose, Baden has amassed nearly 10,000 photos over 27 years, part of an ongoing art project dubbed "Every Day."
"It's a project where I'm interested in what happens to my face and flesh," Baden told Boston's WCVB-TV in February.
Baden, who kept his hairstyle and facial hair virtually the same for the project, says he's missed just one day — in 1991 — of selfie-taking. The reason? He "forgot."
In terms of brevity, though, Baden and Cornellier have nothing on ClickHole, which recently produced a time-lapse video of a woman who took a photo of herself every day for a whole week.
