This is the oldest surviving photograp ever taken. It was captured by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. As he could not draw well, he developed a fascination for lithography and started engraving forms and pictures, made transparent, onto stone and glass plates. After experimenting for 10 years this picture emerged.
Moron question of the day!
Did he post it on instagram?
He did not. It took 8 hours to capture this scenery in a fairly complex proceeding. Niépce placed a camera obscura (an optical device, which projected an image of its surroundings on a screen) in the window of his upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras. But the real innovation was that he also ‘put a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum) in the camera and uncapped the lens. At the end of the day he took out the plate and rendered the image visible by washing it with a mixture of oil lavender and white petroleum, which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light.’ The result was a permanent direct poisitive picture. The first ever made! It is a scenery containing outbuildings, courtyard, trees and landscape as seen from that upstairs window.
Niépce himself called this method ‘Heliography’. He died only 7 years after his invention without any recognition. After travelling from hand to hand it was real value was appreciated by Harry Ransom who purchased it for the Gernsheim Collection. It was subsequently donated to The University of Texas at Austin by Helmu Gernsheim in 1963. It still rests in the university in its original frame. 
I had seen this picture before I read about it a few times and I was completely convinced that there is a person in it, on the left side. Maybe I am just imagining it because of the millions of ‘duckfaces’ and mirror self portraits on facebook. But I like to think that it could be the inventor himself who snuck into the picture to finally get the credit he deserves after all.
Firstopedia 