Pre-Selfie Days: When the World Was the View, Not the Backdrop

A quiet, absorbing collection of found analogue photographs from before the age of social media, showing ordinary people facing the view rather than the lens – an invitation to rediscover the world in front of us

Much of modern life now plays out on social media, with our faces increasingly present in the frame and the world slowly becoming merely the backdrop. But there was a time before sharing ourselves online became part of living life; before having something to share became a reason to go somewhere.

Pre-Selfie Days celebrates this era through a curated collection of 70 found photographs of ordinary people from around the world, spanning different decades. Their backs turned to the camera, their eyes on what is in front of them, each individual gazes towards glorious vistas, sandy beaches, snow-topped mountains, deep canyons, great lakes, or famous landmarks. We catch a glimpse of what held their attention and are invited to follow their gaze.

These photographs may be undatable, but each belongs to the era of film, when a point-and-shoot camera held a fixed number of frames and every one of them counted. There’s a particular nostalgia in that constraint. A special place revisited, or one glimpsed once in a lifetime, these earned the frame. Long before photographs were taken to be posted digitally, they were taken to be kept, as evidence that a moment, a view, had once been witnessed.

Many of the newly scanned images in this collection have never been published before. They come from the personal archive of author Karel De Mulder or have been gathered from the archives of collectors from across the globe, giving this intriguing, pocket-sized paperback book a genuinely international scope and revealing something universal in the way we look at the world.

Presented without commentary, Pre-Selfie Days offers a chosen perspective on the past and presents us with a simple idea: to let the world be more than a backdrop, to leave room for something other than ourselves.