Selfies of History

Selfies of History came from one simple joke: what would history look like if the people inside it had camera phones?

I used Midjourney to put historical figures inside familiar selfie poses, then had GPT-4 write Twitter-style captions that I overlaid in Photoshop. The anachronism did most of the comedic work: centuries of historical imagery flattened into the visual language of a phone screen.

The idea later split into two related series, Viral Selfies of Fiction and Tinder Profiles of History. That was the first sign that the basic joke could behave like a repeatable format rather than a single batch of images.