[image]
[title]For Christmas of 2014, an antichrist was born. It expanded to over a metre long and was made from a cheap mix of plastic and metal. On one end, it had a simple clip at the end to attach your horizontal phone; on the other, a Bluetooth button to press with your thumb. Its name was the selfie stick, and it was ready to stretch our collective patience to breaking point.
The selfie stick’s schtick was simple. For the first time in the history of humanity, you could take photos of yourself from a distance, without having to do the embarrassing dance of asking someone else or hyper-extending your arm to the point of tendon damage. Tourists could suddenly capture their every move. And you could barely move, as a tourist, without nearly being knocked in the face by one.
It became the biggest craze of the festive season, with Amazon UK selling 301 percent more of them between September and November ahead of Christmas. When the big day arrived, millions of people across the world unwrapped the gadget, wielding it at office parties, tourist hotspots and NYE bashes.
Technically, the ‘multi-axis omni-directional shooting extender’ wasn’t a totally novel invention. In the 1979 Czechoslovak sci-fi film I Killed Einstein, Gentleman, a character holds a sort-of selfie stick aloft. Then, in 1983, Ueda Hiroshi and Mimia Yujiro patented a telescopic pole for compact cameras. And in 1995, another kind-of selfie stick was featured in 101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions – the bible of Japan's art trend Chindogu, which sees inventors design supposedly pointless products.
Then, in 2005, Wayne Fromm – a Canadian inventor behind the likes of Crayloa's Colour and Show Projector and Nestle's Nesquik Magic Milkshake Maker – came up with a similar gadget called the QuikPod.
‘I was travelling in Europe with my daughter and always frustrated trying to scout and select a stranger to approach who might have the time to use my camera to take a photo of us,’ Fromm tells Time Out. Plus, he felt that asking a random meant running the risk of them ruining his phone or camera (or doing it himself through a dodgy self-timer prop-up).
Fromm began to deconstruct umbrellas, radio antennas and poles used to attach swimming pool vacuum heads to find a solution. By 2007, the QuikPod, his very own selfie stick, hit QVC and sold like hot dogs in Times Square, making him a fortune. But it swiftly became, like every craze ever, copied to the point of self-parody with thousands of cheap knock-offs peddled by street vendors across the globe.
Then came 2015: the perfect point in time for the selfie stick to properly plant itself into pop culture. Just a few years earlier, the selfie had become a global phenomenon, fuelled by the fact that, for the first time, over a billion smartphones were being sold every single year.
The humble selfie stick faced an issue, though – as popular as it was, it was also instantly despised. The British Heart Foundation rated the selfie stick as the most unwanted gift of the following Christmas – alongside, apparently, the Insanity workout DVD, if you somehow remember that – based, most likely, on bulk donations. The backlash was palpable; from the start of 2015, the likes of the National Gallery, Disneyland and Wimbledon began to ban the contraption at their attractions.
The backlash was palpable; from the start of 2015, the likes of Disneyland and Wimbledon began to ban the contraption
So why did we want to stick the selfie stick where the sun doesn't shine as soon as it appeared? The gadget came to be seen as a symbol of an increasing self-absorption, when online content was beginning to turn very me-me-me. We didn’t want to take photos of landmarks anymore, but of ourselves, proving that we were there (wherever there might be).
The ‘Wand of Narcissus’ – as it was quickly nicknamed – was at the vanguard of this new vanity. ‘Are selfie sticks just appealing to narcissists, or might they actually be enhancing people’s narcissism?’ asked Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in The Guardian.
The device was also a nuisance for locals. If it wasn’t enough having gawking tourists taking over your city, they now came armed with a new weapon. While it might have led to nice photographs for those using them, they were an absolute eyesore for the rest of us. And a genuine hazard, at that. There were 379 selfie-related deaths between 2008 and 2021, including a Welsh walker being struck by lightning when his selfie stick acted as a conductor.
If it wasn’t enough having gawking tourists taking over your city, they now came armed with a new weapon
But, amid the hate, the selfie stick did have some early supporters, including cult documentary photographer Martin Parr, a pioneer of the candid tourist snap. In 2015, he wrote a blog celebrating the selfie stick as a new photographic tool.
‘When you shoot people with the subject in the background, you get the people and the attraction in one go,’ Parr tells Time Out. His 2019 book Death By Selfie is filled with photographs showcasing, as the blurb reads, how ‘the selfie stick [has] changed the ritual of a tourist visit in a dramatic fashion.’ Does he still admire them? ‘There are many surreal images to be found,’ he says.
It’s true that while many selfie stick photos are totally naff, they do allow you to shoot from new angles and perspectives, capturing your surroundings from a birds-eye view. ‘People were used to outstretching their arms to take selfies but their head size would be disproportionate to others in the photo,’ Fromm explains.
Although art galleries were quick to ban the selfie stick, they have since become a muse of sorts; exhibitions at the likes of the Saatchi Gallery and National Museum Cardiff have attempted to join the dots between the selfie and classical artists’ self-portraits.
Perhaps, then, we were wrong to stick it to the stick. Was cringing at their gauche design a form of snobbery? Were we just projecting our own insecurities a metre in front of us, afraid of being tourists?
‘It’s unfair in many ways; we never derided tripods. My dad was never in our family photos as he was always the photographer. I wish my invention had been available when I was a child as I’d have more cherished photos with him included,’ Fromm says. He believes we should blame the owner, not the rod. ‘The problem was behavior, not the QuikPod. People were extending the sticks in crowds, at theme parks, museums, art galleries and such, causing damage to artifacts in some places,’ he explains.
Either way, the selfie stick is now all but a relic. They’re very much a lesser-spotted item in holiday bingo, only seen in the most mainstream landmarks or overgrown tourist traps. Once ubiquitous, the selfie stick has collapsed into itself, likely forever. ‘It was a bit of a fad. Many people still do selfies, but without the stick,’ Parr notes. Soon, the selfie stick will appear in museums again – but in perspex boxes, not visitors’ backpacks.