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Who made the first permanent photograph from nature?

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Alfred Stieglitz: Child with Striped Dress (Younger Raab Child) — History of photography *Child with Striped Dress (Younger Raab Child)*, autochrome photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907; in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The first permanent photograph from nature was created by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827.12

Niépce achieved this using a process he called heliography, which involved coating a polished pewter plate with a light-sensitive solution of bitumen of Judea. He placed the plate inside a camera obscura and positioned it near a window in his country estate, Le Gras. After an exposure lasting several hours or possibly days, the bitumen hardened in areas exposed to sunlight, capturing a permanent black-and-white image of the courtyard outside.12

While earlier scientists like Johann Heinrich Schulze had demonstrated that silver salts darken when exposed to light, they did not succeed in fixing those images permanently. Niépce’s breakthrough provided the first successful mechanical reproduction of a scene from nature, a foundation upon which he later partnered with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre to further refine photographic processes.312